Today I discovered a small app in Cydia called Backgrounder. For those that don’t know, Cydia is an app store type application that’s installed when you jailbreak an iPhone. It’s mostly filled with tweaks, early 3rd party apps and some new ones too.

Backgrounder allows most apps from the App Store to run in the background. For example my GPS fitness app, RunKeeper, will keep running when I return to the home screen. TomTom will still keep your progress and give audio cues. It works for instant messenger apps too. While you won’t get notifcations or icon updates, you can still hear your new messages and when you go back, there’s no reconnecting. Great! It works while some applications update too. You’ll still have to be aware of what you are running in the background though, so you don’t drain the battery quicker.

The way to use this app is pretty simple. All you have to do is hold down the home button for a few seconds while in an app then Backgrounder is active and it drops you to the home screen. You are then free to enter and exit any app. Once you want the app to close properly, just hold the home button down again while in that app. Simple.

Thanks again jailbreaking community, for doing what Apple refuses to do.

http://code.google.com/p/iphone-backgrounder/wiki/Documentation