Yes, thanks for your support and for making JuicePhone such a success! Thanks for downloading it, thanks for contacting us and giving us feedback, thanks for donating, and simply thanks for using and enjoying it. That’s a lot of ‘thank yous’, but this whole project has been an incredible experience from the very start, and that’s because of your support. So those ‘thank yous’ are appropriate. Thank you :)

As a little bonus, we’re ‘releasing’ a small tool which we originally whipped up for a user of ours. Remember the mirroring feature we released with the latest update of JuicePhone? Although its main purpose is the shorter extraction time and less disk space usage, it gives you the possibility to directly modify files in a backup. The problem is, some of the files inside a backup are protected by previously-generated hash values (the backup will not restore if these hashes are detected to be wrong), and JPHashChecker can fix those for you. With its help, you can edit files inside a backup and be sure that your modified backup will actually restore without any errors. The application is extremely “quick ‘n’ dirty” and not polished at all, but it should do its job. We don’t know how useful this will be to you, but if you’d like to use it, here you go. Download

Extracting a backup can be very helpful, but if you just want to look at the content of a single file with mountains of other data in your backup, waiting for all those files to copy can become extremely cumbersome. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just access the backup’s contents without actually extracting and copying everything out of it? Well, that’s exactly what you can do with mirroring! As opposed to duplicating the backup files in the normal extraction process, this feature only creates links for every included file, which makes the extraction process faster and saves a lot of disk space at the same time. You can choose between using “soft” and “hard” links (more info on that inside JuicePhone’s Preferences). However, you have to be a little careful— if you make changes to any files in a mirrored backup, they are actually applied to the backup itself, not just a copy of it. Also, if iTunes creates a newer backup of the device, the contents of already-existing files will be updated, but new files won’t be added to the mirrored backup. For completing such a simple task as mentioned in the beginning, this shouldn’t be a problem though, so we’re confident that mirroring will make handling backups more convenient for many of you.

We’ve received multiple requests for adding the ability to modify backups. We certainly haven’t forgotten about this, and mirrored backups are a step in that direction as well. Of course, we’re still far away from offering an easy, foolproof way to modify and (re-)assemble backups, since you can neither add nor delete files by accessing a mirrored backup, and iTunes may refuse to restore certain modified mirrored files, but the feature could possibly help you achieve some of your personal goals ;). As for a genuine modification feature, we aren’t completely sure yet how to technically implement this as an automatic, safe, and user-friendly process. In addition, we’re working on another project at the moment that we hope to release together with iOS 5.

Speaking of which, a second, relatively invisible, but nonetheless important feature of JuicePhone 2.3 is full iOS 5 compability. Like in every major iOS release in the past, Apple once again made some changes to the format of their backups. Thankfully, we are members of the iPhone Developer Program and therefore have access to pre-release builds of the new software, and we were able to figure out how that new backup format works. We’ve streamlined the decoding process for both iOS 4 and iOS 5 backups, and removed some performance bottlenecks while we were at it. So, as soon as you take the plunge and update your devices, JuicePhone will be set to do its job — as usual. (Please note that as of now, we were only able to test backups from iOS 5 beta 2, but we strongly doubt that Apple will make further changes regarding backups.)

All in all, we hope you’ll find some of the new features useful. Also, happy Independence Day to our American audience!

After recieving lots of emails with very similar questions, we began to feel the need for a Frequently Asked Questions section on our website – which has now become reality. Most of our users’s questions are answered there, so it’s the best place to check if you have a question relating to one of our apps (currently only JuicePhone).

Secondly, we’ve restructured the JuicePhone site a little, by reorganizing some parts, adding the release dates to every JuicePhone version (as requested by a user) and, most importantly, placing a Flattr button at the bottom. In the past, we’ve never accepted donations for our work, mainly because we’ve had some plans for paid iOS applications. We haven’t ceased to pursue these, but our lives have been sort of overwhelming us in the last few months, leaving us with little time for our project/company. Keeping the site up, especially with all those downloads, isn’t that cheap, as we also have to pay our Mac / iOS Developer Program member fees, so we were wondering if we could give our users the ability to support us a little financially. We’re certainly not begging for donations (!) and JuicePhone will remain free of charge for everyone, but if you enjoy our app and want to give us back a tiny ”Thank you!’, well, now you can ;)

Oh, and last, but not least, THANK YOU for an incredible amount of 80.000 downloads! You rock!

Let’s start from the beginning: Ever since its announcement last October, and especially since its release date of January 6th, we thought JuicePhone would make a great spot in the App Store. Since our application accesses iOS backup data, though, which is, of course, not supported/documented by Apple (there probably wouldn’t have been a need for JuicePhone!), we never really considered the possibility of getting through the approval process – until we found an application doing exactly that. It is quite different from JuicePhone (in its form as well as its purpose), but under the hood it also accesses iOS backups, so attempting to submit JuicePhone seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

We registered for the Mac Developer Program and submitted (a slightly App Store-optimized version of) JuicePhone. The review team took quite a while to answer, and after weeks of anticipation we realized they had rejected it. They claimed that directly accessing “system files” without a public Mac OS X interface would lead to a poor user experience once these files were updated (for example, in a new version of iOS with a different backup format) and “modifying” that data without a public interface lead to our rejection. However, JuicePhone never modifies anything; it just reads your backups. Just to point out, our app does not use any private interfaces; we just wrote our own, using a combination of public ones, but Apple didn’t like us reading iOS backups, which they consider private. We don’t think we violated the Apple Review Terms per se, but you could interpret it as such. Nevertheless, we pointed out that another application reading iOS backups already exists – it just seemed a little unfair to us ;)

We submitted these arguments to the App Review Board a day after getting rejected. The response seemed to take forever (they must have a lot of stuff to do), until we finally recieved a call from “Steve at Apple Developer Relations” (not Jobs, because he was busy presenting the iPad 2 at that moment ;D) last night (around morning/noon in California time). He told us in person that reading iOS backup files is considered undocumented and therefore our application has no chance of being approved in the Mac App Store. Steve didn’t know how/why that other app had been approved, but he said he would look into it (on the off chance that application should actually be pulled – this definitely is not what we wanted!).

…

Unfortunately, this seems like all we can do, this whole story is quite pitiful (at least to us), but that’s probably just life. Nevertheless, we still hope you’ll continue to enjoy JuicePhone, even if it’s not in the App Store!

We’re really thankful to all JuicePhone users for making the project such a success! Especially, thanks to all of you who contacted us. It’s really nice to get some direct feedback from our “customers,” and we wouldn’t have been able to fix some major bugs without your help. If you have a problem, a feature request or even a compliment, always feel free to leave a comment or drop us a mail.

We have another, this time rather minor, update ready for you. It adds a Cellular Info button to the backup overview which provides you with access to your iPhone’s or iPad 3G’s telephone number, IMEI and ICCID, fixes the mistaken incompatibility with PowerPC-based Macs along with various bugs and features a little pseudo easter egg in appreciation. As usual, click here to download or check our JuicePhone page for more information.

Having that said, happy (belated) Thanksgiving, enjoy your turkey leftovers and have a nice day!

again, quite a bit of time has passed since our last blog post, and although our private lives “overwhelmed” us at some points during the last couple of months, we weren’t absolutely inactive and therefore have some updates for you.

First of all, after releasing JuicePhone version 2.1 in mid-July, we just completed another important update. Most significantly, version 2.2 fixes the mysterious “no window” bug which occurred as soon as a device running iOS 4.1 was backed up. The problem was caused by another change in Apple’s Mobile Device backup format. This time, the way iTunes 10 (and the new iOS) describe a device’s installed applications was modified. iOS 4.1 now only backs up the app’s so-called bundle identifier (e.g. com.apple.Remote) instead of its full name, which caused the old JuicePhone to potentially crash if it didn’t find some of the other necessary information. The new version will therefore attempt to “guess” your app’s names and developers if it can’t find them. Apart from that, JuicePhone 2.2 recognizes the 4th generation iPod touch, has a new icon and contains some other minor tweaks. Click here to download!

Next, we were approved by Apple in the iPhone Developer Program, which makes us capable of submitting apps to the App Store. Although we don’t have anything concrete to tell you right now, stay tuned for some future projects!

We have also acquired the domain addpod.com and will therefore completely switch over to “.com” some time in the near future. Our site will, of course, still be accessible through our current addpod.de domain.

That’s pretty much all for now, we hope that we can keep you a little bit more up-to-date in the future. Have fun!

first of all – thanks for visiting! We were gone for quite a while and we’re terribly sorry for leaving you with a totally outdated version of JuicePhone and a boring “under construction” website. However, we’re back! And we’re proud to present a brand new version of JuicePhone! Having learned from the past, JuicePhone 2.0 is loaded with tons of new features:

• JuicePhone finally supports the new firmware 3.x backup format, but we’ve also kept the older format for compability reasons. Either way, it is compatible with any iPhone/iPod touch backup (as of today), firmware 1.x-3.x and/or iTunes 7.x-9.x backups.
• Next, you now have the possibility to perform app-specific extractions: JuicePhone allows you choose certain apps to extract in an icon-based grid view. It looks nice and also saves you lots of time.
• In addition to the custom app grid, JuicePhone overall features a far more eye-candyish and user-friendly interface. We’re sure you’ll like it!
• Last but not least, JuicePhone is multi-core optimized and 64-bit capable, making extracting backups more efficient.

That pretty much covers all of the main new functions. We’ve also tweaked and added a few other things, so be sure to check out the JuicePhone page and try it out.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!!