WiFried
WiFried jailbreak tweak fixes Wi-Fi issues for iOS 8-iOS 8.1. Twitter

As promised by jailbreak apps developers, Mario Ciabarra has released a new jailbreak tweak called WiFried, which fixes the annoying Wi-Fi issue in iOS 8-iOS 8.1.

Mario claims to have narrowed down the issue of Apple's Wireless Direct Link (AWDL), which is a low latency/high speed Wi-Fi peer-to-peer connection used in AirDrop, GameKit (which also uses Bluetooth) and AirPlay. AWDL works using its own dedicated network interface, which is 'awdlo'.

A few of the features such as Instant HotSpot, Bluetooth Tethering and GameKit push their service via Bluetooth SDP, whereas the AirDrop does it over Wi-Fi, which in turn affects the Wi-Fi performance for Yosemite and iOS 8 users. These Wi-Fi issues are due to Apple's choice of using Bonjour software over AWDL, blogs Mario.

If you want to reproduce this issue on any iPhone, "Perform a speed test (many apps to choose from) and simply pull open the Control Center. This will cause the discoveryd process to browse and advertise services over your WiFi interface. You'll see an immediate reduction in WiFi speeds that will continue for a minute or two while the AWDL interface continues to browse/advertise. This occurs when Bluetooth is turned on as well as turned off, so it doesn't appear to be a Bluetooth coexistence issue," explains the blog post.

To help users who are still on iOS 8-iOS 8.1 and who don't want to lose their jailbreak, Mario has created a disabled feature and located it in the AirDrop menu in the Control Center. The tweak is called WiFried, which is now available in Cydia for free.

This tweak will allow you to enable/disable the D2DWiFi/AWDL and it can be turned off/on under the AirDrop settings, which is in Control Center.

Wi-Fi issue on Yosemite

As Mario notes, you can fix the Wi-Fi issues on Yosemite by disabling AWDL and AirDrop and executing the following commands at the OSX terminal.

  • sudo ifconfig awdl0 down

In order to restore AirDrop and AWDL, type in the following command

  • sudo ifconfig awdl0 up