Geranium: five iOS device utilities bundled into one TrollStore app

Five utilities that have no reason to live together

The project description lists the whole product in one line: LocSim, Daemon Manager, Cleaner, ScreenTime Remover and Superviser for TrollStore. Read as a software design question, that is an unusual grouping. A location simulator and a storage cleaner share no code, no data model and no user, and the same is true of a daemon manager and a device supervision tool.

The grouping has one plausible motive: installation cost. On iOS, an ordinary app from the App Store cannot do any of this. TrollStore provides permanent installation with an unrestricted entitlement profile, and once that route is open, bundling several utilities into one binary means one download and one install rather than five.

The supported platform is narrow by construction. The installation section requires TrollStore 1.3 or later and a device on iOS 15 or later, qualified by the parenthesis if TrollStore supports it. The whole value proposition is therefore conditional on an unofficial installer being present and functional on that device.

The code is Swift, the repository holds an Xcode project, and the licence is GPL-3.0, which for a distributed app means anyone receiving a copy of it has the corresponding source rights. That is unusual in this corner of the iOS tooling world and is a point in the project's favour.

LocSim fakes a location and can pull bookmarks in from Apple Maps

The location simulator is the feature with the longest lineage in the README. It is described as simulating fake locations plus bookmarks, and it is the one part of the app that comes with a compatibility story: the README says you can import your old bookmarks from Mika's LocSim by going into the bookmarks tab, and that you can save new bookmarks from Apple Maps.

That import path is the interesting detail. It tells you the app is a successor rather than a first attempt, and it tells you the author expects users arriving from an existing tool with an existing bookmark collection. The repository also has a directory named Bookmark Location in Geranium/ at the top level, which is where that data lives.

The credits section adds another data point about the implementation. acg7878 is credited for altitude and China coordinates support in LocSim, which is the kind of detail that only appears when the app has been used outside the original author's home region. The location feature also gets credit from sourcelocation for SwiftUI extensions and functions that the author describes as a source of information in icon and video editing.

What the README does not describe is how a simulated location reaches the rest of the system. There is no note about which location APIs are hooked, whether other apps see the faked position, or whether the setting survives a reboot, so a reader has to judge the feature from the screenshots rather than from documentation.

The Cleaner targets the Other category, and admits its numbers are rough

The storage cleaner attacks a specific and recognisable problem. The README frames it around the Other category taking up all of the space on an iDevice, and it says some users have cleaned more than 16Gb of storage with the tool.

Then it qualifies that claim twice in as many sentences, which is unusual and welcome. The screenshots are not accurate because they were taken on a simulator that did not have the cleaned directories, and the calculated sizes are not always accurate. In other words, the headline figure comes from users, and the app's own size estimates are approximations.

That honesty matters for how you use the feature. The Cleaner is best treated as a tool that reclaims space in the long tail of application data, where a few large files sit inside directories that the operating system labels generically, rather than as a precise reporting system. Anyone who wants to know exactly how much was removed should measure with the device's own storage settings.

The screenshots in the repository are the same story: the repository's image files are the primary documentation for this feature, since the README text around them is mostly a claim about storage reclaimed plus a caveat.

The daemon manager comes from the jailbreak community's own tooling

Daemon management on iOS is a jailbreak era concept, and the credits show where the implementation came from. BomberFish and Fiore are credited for their work on daemon listing, with a separate mention of BomberFish for the memes in the feature section.

The feature's pitch is selective control. The README asks whether you are using HomeKit and other Apple features and want to optimise the phone's performance, and points at the daemon manager as the place to choose what you want to use. In practice this means turning services on or off that would otherwise be running, which is the difference between a device that runs everything the system offers and one trimmed to what you actually use.

The cost of that approach is the same as with the Cleaner: the app is a controller for behaviour it does not itself define. Whether disabling a daemon frees meaningful resources is a question about your device and your usage, and the repository contains no measurement to settle it.

The distinction between this feature and the next two is worth keeping in mind. Daemon management is a local device setting, the Screen Time section touches an account level control, and the supervision feature installs organisational configuration. Bundling them in one app does not make them share the same risk.

Screen Time removal and device supervision are the two features with consequences

The Screen Time section is short and blunt: if you have forgotten your Screen Time password, this lets you say goodbye to Screen Time on the iOS device, and it also works with iCloud Screen Time. The README then attaches a disclaimer telling readers not to use it if their parents manage their Screen Time, because getting caught would probably make things worse, and stating that the author is not responsible if you get told off.

That disclaimer is the honest part. The feature removes a control that in many households exists to protect a minor from themselves, and the README says so plainly rather than pretending the use case is only personal convenience.

The supervision feature is different in kind rather than in degree. It lets you supervise a device with a custom organisation name, without needing a computer, and the README mentions a collection of supervised profiles. Supervised devices carry organisational controls that the owner of the device does not fully control, which is a capability that can be used to restrict a device rather than to free it.

Both features deserve the same scrutiny from an adopter's point of view, and both are the reason the permission level of the app, granted through TrollStore's unrestricted signing, is worth thinking about before installation rather than after.

Building the app needs Theos, an SDK and ipabuild.sh

The build instructions are the most concrete part of the README, and they spell out a toolchain that is not the ordinary Xcode one.

Requirements : A Mac having Xcode installed (it can also be a Hackintosh).
1. Clone this repository (make sure you don't download it as zip but clone it!):
2. [Install Theos and it's requirements](https://theos.dev/docs/installation-macos)
4. Ensure you have the [iPhoneOS14.5.sdk SDK](https://github.com/theos/sdks/tree/master/iPhoneOS14.5.sdk) installed
6. Done ! Your `tipa` file will be located in `build` directory.

The clone step carries a warning that the repository must be cloned rather than downloaded as a zip, which points at the .gitmodules file at the root and at the RootHelper directory that holds the privileged helper. Theos is required because the build produces a package rather than an app bundle, and the specific iPhoneOS14.5.sdk SDK is pinned, so the compiler target is fixed rather than tracking the latest SDK in Xcode.

The output is a tipa file in the build directory, which is what TrollStore consumes. The README also notes that if you hit problems, you can contact the author on Discord or use the commit labelled to the latest release, which is a sensible fallback for a build with a pinned toolchain.

The project directory listing shows the rest of the anatomy: Geranium.xcodeproj/ for the app sources, entitlements.plist for the entitlement declarations, and icon.sketch for the icon, which the README asks contributors to replace with a 1024x1024 image that does not round the borders.

Release gaps, a long translation list and GPL-3.0

The release history has a clear shape. Release 1.1.2 came out on 2024-02-22, Release 1.1.3 on 2024-09-15 and Release 1.1.4 on 2026-07-04, which is the same day as the last push to the repository. The repository is not archived.

So the app is shipped at irregular intervals, with roughly twenty-two months between the second and third listed releases, and the newest release is aligned with the tip of the branch. That pattern suits a project maintained by one person, which is who the README identifies as the author, with contributors supplying translations and fixes rather than driving the roadmap.

The translation credits support that reading. A long list of named translators covers Chinese in both traditional and simplified, Czech, Slovak, Spanish in Latin American variants, Italian, Catalan, Albanian, Vietnamese, Korean, Swedish, Japanese and more, and the README says translations are contributed over Discord. For an app with a fixed set of screens, that is an unusually wide language coverage and it is a sign of a user base rather than a demo.

Licence wise, GPL-3.0 governs the source. Combined with the TrollStore distribution model, that means a modified build has to be shared under the same terms, and anyone redistributing the app carries the corresponding obligations. The README does not describe a separate privacy policy for the location simulation or the supervision profiles, so treat both features with the same care you would give any tooling that handles device identifiers and organisational configuration.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Geranium if you already run TrollStore, you want location simulation, storage cleanup and daemon control in one place, and you are comfortable with an app whose features have nothing to do with each other. Do not adopt it to bypass Screen Time on a device your parents manage, since the README itself warns against that, and do not treat it as a jailbreak replacement since it depends on TrollStore being present. Verify first by installing Release 1.1.4 through TrollStore on a device running iOS 15 or later, and by checking the reported cleaned size in the Cleaner tab against the device's own storage screen, because the README states the calculated sizes are not always accurate.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. c22dev/Geranium on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: GPL-3.0
4. README
5. Releases