As many iMessage users know, there are certain keywords that you can send to others to trigger animations during special events. For example, sending “Congrats” triggers a confetti animation, sending “Happy Birthday” triggers a balloons animation, and sending “Happy New Year” triggers a fireworks animation.
You can also send “Eid Mubarak” to someone in iMessage to trigger a shooting star animation, and while it’s traditionally used as a greeting in Muslim culture to wish someone well during celebrations of Eid al-Fitr (the end of Ramadan) and Eid al-Adha, many iMessage users have warmed up to how this shooting star animation looks and wish that they could use it more often in other messages as an effect.
Fortunately, iOS developer fiore has released a new and free jailbreak tweak called ShootingStar that lets you do exactly that. Once installed, you will see the option to send iMessages with the Shooting Star effect even for ordinary messages that you send to friends and family, joining the more traditional message effects that are already regularly used, including:
- Echo
- Spotlight
- Balloons
- Confetti
- Love
- Lasers
- Fireworks
- Celebration
Since Apple allows you to use pretty much every other message effect with ordinary messages, it seems odd that they don’t give users this option with the pleasant Shooting Star effect. Fortunately, this jailbreak tweak fixes that. In fact, even non-jailbroken iPhone and iPad users that you iMessage with this effect will see it, even when you aren’t sending them the words “Eid Mubarak,” as shown in the animated GIF example below:
While it’s a relatively minor tweak that simply adds new aesthetics to your device and nothing more, it’s jailbreak tweaks like this that make jailbreaking fun. By unlocking new effects and capabilities that weren’t before possible without saying a specific keyword in iMessage, you can use jailbreaking to bring your iMessage conversations to the next level.
Those interested in giving the new ShootingStar jailbreak tweak a try can download it for free from fiore’s personal repository via their favorite package manager app. The tweak supports jailbroken iOS 15 and 16 devices and requires the use of the Messages app on the iPhone or iPad to take advantage of.
Anyone that isn’t already using fiore’s personal repository can add it to their package manager app by using the URL provided below:
https://donato-fiore.github.io/repo/
Will you be sending more messages with the Shooting Star effect now that you have access to the ShootingStar jailbreak tweak? Let us know why or why not in the comments section down below.