Remove Background – Must Have Cydia Tweak For iPhone 4 [Jailbreak]

With iOS 4 Apple introduced the ability to run apps in background with the multitasking bar. You can activate the multitasking bar by double tapping your Home button.

In my iPhone 4 (jailbroken) though, I have the setting in SBSettings turned on to show free memory available. It could be that I am running Winterboard and a host of other jailbreak tweaks but I see the iPhone 4 free memory keep dropping down. This follows by iPhone 4 responsiveness taking a massive hit.

Then I would have to launch the iOS 4 multitasking bar and clear out apps running in the background. By default, iOS 4 is designed to keep any app you open in the background until you intentionally kill it or restart your iPhone or iPad.

I do this by hitting the Home button twice and then holding the app icon until they start wiggling. Now, I can start tapping on the ‘x’ marks on the app icons to remove them from memory. As I do this, I can watch the free memory increase and so does my iPhone 4 performance.

Remove Background Cydia Tweak

As the name suggests, this little free cydia tweak called Remove Background makes this process really simple. One tap on this jailbreak app and all your background apps are gone. Poof. Just like that.

Remove Background usually brings my free memory from ~30MB to 256MB in a couple of seconds. That is a huge increase and my iPhone 4 is as speedy as ever.

One thing you’d notice straight away after using this app to clear out our background apps is that you really didn’t mean to clear out everything!

Luckily, Remove Background app has an option called Exceptions. You can go in here and specify the apps you always want to run in the background. Once you have done this, Remove Background will remove eevery app except the ones in this list.

This problem is not unique to jailbroken iPhones though. Earlier, I had a problem where my iPhone 4 won’t turn on. I took it to the Apple Store Genius bar and the first thing they suggested was to clear out background apps once a day. I could do this by launching the multitasking bar and killing every app manually.

Or use this jailbreak tweak do it in a couple of seconds. Remove Background is available as an app in your homescreen. However, I prefer the Remove Background SBSettings toggle which lets me swipe my status bar and just tap on RemoveBG to clear out the memory.

Even though I mention this app as a must have for iPhone 4 users, Shriya uses it on her iPhone 3GS running iOS 4 and finds it useful.

I am putting together a list of must have SBSettings toggle tweaks and this is definitely going to be at the top of the list.

We invite you to check out list of must have jailbreak apps and also tell us what you would like to see in that list.