Home Bar

Customize your iPhone’s Home Bar without bounds with myBar

Anthony Bouchard ∙ May 20, 2020

If your iPhone doesn’t have a Home Button, then it probably has a Home Bar instead. The Home Bar provides a convenient pathway for accessing the Home Screen, App Switcher, Reachability, and other imperative things, but one thing Apple appears to have left out is customization.

Enter myBar, a newly released jailbreak tweak by iOS developer Sirius24 that introduces extensive options for customizing the Home Bar’s aesthetics. And if that didn’t sound exciting enough, it should be noted that myBar offers enough configuration out of the box to appease picky minimalists or even the most extreme of interface tinkerers.

ColorMyHome lets jailbreakers add a fresh coat of paint to the Home Bar

Anthony Bouchard ∙ May 14, 2020

If you have an iPhone newer than the iPhone X, except for a few select budget handsets, then you probably have a Home Bar instead of a Home Button. Apple designed it to be omnifunctional, providing users with a means of getting to the App Switcher, Home Screen, and navigating between recently used apps; but one thing they seem to have forgotten is customization.

Fortunately, jailbreakers don’t need to put up with a bland Home Bar experience. That’s because a newly released and free jailbreak tweak called ColorMyHome by iOS developer TheLazyITGuy enables Home Bar colorization on liberated handsets.

ReachCC13 opens Control Center with iOS’ native Reachability gesture

Anthony Bouchard ∙ February 22, 2020

Control Center is an incredibly convenient section of iOS that provides instantaneous access to your favorite toggles and shortcuts, but if you have a larger iPhone such as the XS Max or 11 Pro Max, then you might have trouble getting to the interface with just one hand given how the gesture to open Control Center involves the very top-right corner of the display.

Here to solve the aforementioned problem is a newly released and free jailbreak tweak called ReachCC13 by iOS developer Kritanta. Just as the name implies, this tweak modifies the behavior of the iPhone’s native Reachability gesture to launch Control Center when invoked instead.

OneHandWizard 2 makes one-handed usage of massive iPhones easier

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated May 16, 2022

There’s no doubting the fact that smartphones are receiving larger displays by popular demand, and while this can be considered a benefit from the standpoint of media consumption, it also tends to be a shortcoming by way of one-handed usage.

Apple tries to make things on handsets with large displays easier to reach with just one hand through a native Accessibility feature called Reachability, but using it can be cumbersome, and it tends to lack much-needed functionality. For those who demand more out of their one-handed smartphone usage, it’s tough to go wrong with a jailbreak tweak called OneHandWizard 2 by iOS developer sharedRoutine.

This tweak automatically hides the Home Bar when it isn’t needed

Anthony Bouchard ∙ January 22, 2020

Newer iPhone and iPad Pro models have ditched the traditional Home Button in favor of an edge-to-edge display that sports a software-based Home Bar instead. The Home Bar can be used for unlocking, returning to the Home Screen, toggling Reachability, and switching between apps, but many would argue that it doesn’t always need to be visible.

For those looking for a solution to this quandary, a new and free jailbreak tweak called AutoHideHomeBarX by iOS developer Asterix can automatically hide the Home Bar when it isn’t needed and cause it to reappear again when it is.

This tweak makes the Home Bar display your current battery level

Anthony Bouchard ∙ September 15, 2019

Many of Apple’s latest handsets lack a physical Home button, and instead rely on a software-based Home Bar for App Switcher activation, returning to the Home screen, and unlocking the device. Apart from these functionalities, however, the Home Bar itself is somewhat featureless.

If you’d like to give your iOS device’s Home Bar a welcomed helping of new functionality, then we’d recommend turning your attention to a newly released and free jailbreak tweak called BatteryHomeBar by iOS developer Braxton Anderson.

This tweak transforms the Home Bar into a Now Playing progress indicator

Anthony Bouchard ∙ May 20, 2019

All notched handsets, including the iPhone X, XR, XS, and XS Max, ditch the traditional Home Button in lieu of the new Home Bar, which is a software-centric ‘grabber’ that lives at the bottom of your display. The Home Bar is used to unlock your handset, return to the Home screen, and access the App Switcher, but that’s about it.

It seems like the Home Bar could be made to do so much more, and that's why we were particularly fascinated by the release of a new free jailbreak tweak called HomeBarMediaProgress by iOS developer Jordan Koch (eskimo_dev), as it aims to give the Home Bar an added purpose. More specifically, the tweak transforms the Home Bar into a status indicator for any Now Playing media that might be playing in the background.

XEdgeProtect prevents the iPhone X’s Home Bar from conflicting with apps and jailbreak tweaks

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated January 27, 2019

Starting with last year’s iPhone X, Apple nixed the Home Button from its entire lineup of smartphones and replaced it with the software-based Home Bar. The Home Bar resides at the bottom of your display, quietly waiting for upward swipe gestures for unlocking the handset or closing foregrounded apps.

The Home Bar compliments the iOS experience like bread and butter, and it also empowered Apple to achieve the signature edge-to-edge OLED display that many of us know and love, but it’s not without its quirks. Fortunately, a new free jailbreak tweak called XEdgeProtect by iOS developer smokin1337 addresses some of these issues.