Your MakeItMine prefs are showing up on your new iPhone 4

Erica Sadun | 10:08 am | June 27, 2010 | Macintosh, Utilities, iPhone

Hey all. I’m getting lots of e-mail requests to help with iPhone 4 units displaying their MakeItMine prefs. You restored from backup and the prefs traveled with that backup — and now you’re worried about bringing in your iPhone 4 to Apple.

So what do you do?

First, you can always restore your iPhone 4 and not restore from backup. That will allow you to bring in your iPhone to a genius bar without having a custom carrier. Alternatively, you can eliminate your com.apple.springboard.plist files from your backup folders. That allows you to restore from backup without bringing along the customization.

If you need to do the latter, download a copy of mdhelper from my Macintosh utilities folder. Run it at the command line as such:

./mdhelper -files com.apple.springboard.plist -list

The output includes “Matched File” listings, e.g.

Matched File: /Users/ericasadun/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/c4473bce90c232de9e1676fd10456b8c13b2029f-20091023-145902/662bc19b13aecef58a7e855d0316e4cf61e2642b.mdinfo

Those are the files you need to delete, that contain the com.apple.springboard.plist entries. Make sure you delete both the mdinfo file and any matching mddata file, which otherwise has the same name but the other extension.

An iPhone 4 jailbreak should be on the way momentarily and that will allow you to run MakeItMine directly.

For those of you who asked for a copy of the program, for self-signing and running, I’m afraid that won’t work for you. An iPhone needs to be jailbroken to be able to modify the com.apple.springboard.plist file, which lives outside the application sandbox. A self-signed standard app cannot update that file.

Good luck all, and let me know how it goes in the comments.