ProximityLock lets you lock your iPhone with its proximity sensor

ProximityLock Header

Those of you still rocking a jailbreak despite these dry last few weeks have some new jailbreak tweaks to check out this weekend.

One of those is ProximityLock, which is a new freebie that lets you lock your iPhone with nothing more than the proximity sensor by waving your hand over, or putting your finger over the sensor right by the front-facing camera and ear speaker.

An older concept reborn

This concept certainly isn’t new. A jailbreak tweak once covered here on iDB a couple of years ago called FaceOff 7 allowed you to do the same thing and more, but you had to shell out some money for it.

Additionally, this is a feature that can also be accomplished in Ryan Petrich’s popular Activator extension. You would simply use the ProximityActivator add-on for Activator, and then you could assign the action to locking your device. Nevertheless, you still needed to have two, and not one, jailbreak tweak installed to accomplish this task.

With ProximityLock, all you do is install the lone jailbreak tweak, and then enable it from the preferences pane that gets added to your Settings app:

ProximityLock Preferences Pane

After you’ve enabled the tweak, you can wave your hand or finger slowly over your proximity sensor, and your iPhone will lock, forcing you to enter a passcode or utilize Touch ID to get back in.

The tweak also works great for those who want to put their iPhone into their pockets without pressing any buttons to lock it, and this may be good if you have a busted sleep button and don’t want to wait for the iPhone’s software-based auto-lock feature to take effect.

My thoughts on ProximityLock

I think that the scenario of putting your iPhone in your pocket, unlocked, and then taking it out of your pocket to find it locked, is just about going to be the most applicable scenario for most people.

There will, of course, be those who will be paranoid that the tweak won’t work, and will want to use their hand or finger first to ensure the device actually locks before putting it into their pockets, but honestly, the tweak seems to work great. There is very little you can do to trick an infrared sensor from not seeing that there’s something in front of it.

I think that the concept is great, and this is a feature that I would love to see stock on an iPhone, but in its current form, it’s possible that your device could become automatically locked by accident, forcing you to spend your time unlocking it again with your passcode or Touch ID.

Some kind of time-out feature, such as having your proximity sensor covered for 1-3 seconds, may make it more useful in the real world to prevent unintentional situations from locking your device on you.

Wrapping up

As a free tweak in Cydia’s BigBoss repository that seems to work exactly as advertised, I think ProximityLock may be worth the download on your jailbroken iOS 9 iPhone.

Give it a shot and let us know what you think in the comments below!