Mapple Manager

Mapple Manager is Open Mapple’s own app for the phone. It sits on the home screen as Mapple and does three things.

Boot settings

The phone starts with a list of boot settings. Mapple shows the ones you may change, each with a plain description: today Hide notch (a black strip at the top that holds the camera hole), Light UI (less motion and transparency) and sensors on or off. Developer settings, such as the USB link and extra logs, are behind a Developer switch.

Your choices are saved for the next start. The boot partition is never written, so holding Volume Down during the boot (safe boot) always starts the phone without them. Mapple can also restart into safe mode once: the next boot is safe, and the one after is normal. Restore defaults puts the defaults back. The saved line has room for 607 characters; Mapple says so when it is full.

Installing apps

Mapple installs your own builds and open-source apps from an IPA file.

• Apps that are encrypted, the kind from the App Store, are refused.
• Every program in the app must be signed (an ad hoc signature is fine) and may only ask for ordinary app permissions.
• The app is added as a system app with its own data container, because iOS refuses to start an ad hoc-signed user app. Remove it from Mapple’s Apps tab: its icon and its data go.
• Nothing is downloaded and there is no store.

So far only a small test app has been installed this way, and opening an IPA from Files isn’t working yet: Files shows no On My iPhone.

Tweaks

Off by default. One switch installs a tweak loader and Sileo, the package manager, from Procursus’s servers, checked against fixed checksums. With it on, tweaks load into SpringBoard and the apps. Turning it off stops them loading, and Remove deletes the bootstrap and Sileo.

The trade-off: with tweaks on, the phone is less protected. Tweaks run inside every app, and more programs can run as root. Safe boot always starts without tweaks.

Tweaks load, and the bootstrap can be removed again; that is shown. Installing packages from Sileo doesn’t work yet.

Where it is

Mapple is part of Open Mapple, for the realme 8i. Source available with release 1.