fairplayd process on iPhone

Spoiler alert: fairplayd is required by some apps to run, including “xe”, “tap defense” and others.

So I ssh’ed into my iPhone after jailbreaking it and checked the output of ps aux to see what’s running on it. One of the process names that stood out was “fairplayd” located at /usr/sbin/fairplayd .

Googling around indicates that it is used to handle DRM on the iPhone, and since I won’t be needing that I tried to kill it. It just started itself right up, so I searched and found this post on how to remove it: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/1182858.html

launch control was trying to restart fairplayd constantly, but I found a way to turn it off properly.

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.fairplayd.plist

I them moved /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.fairplayd.plist to /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/Archive/com.apple.fairplayd.plist

And now I’m without fairplay .

At first I had no issues, iPod still played music and everything seemed to work. But later I discovered that some apps would crash “springboard” when starting up, which required a reload.

So bottom-line, if you are wondering whether to remove fairplayd or not, don’t. Some apps use it.