This tweak brings haptic feedback to your iPhone

phone vibrating

If you love haptic feedback and you’re now happily jailbroken on iOS 9.3.3, then you ought to check out a new free jailbreak tweak in Cydia called HapticFeedback.

With this tweak, you can receive small haptic vibrations from performing miscellaneous actions on your iPhone.

Haptic Feedback for keyboards

Haptic feedback is a feature that has been available on Android phones forever. It allows the device to respond to touches with a small vibration that gives even a software keyboard a semi-hardware feel by responding to your touch with a light vibration.

It doesn’t turn a software keyboard into a hardware keyboard by any means, but by vibrating, you feel some physical feedback like you would from a real hardware keyboard.

Although the idea never really took off on Apple devices, jailbreakers have always wanted to have the feature too, and as a result, there have been a myriad of jailbreak tweaks to enable haptic feedback while typing. In fact, iOS 10 will soon add some traces of haptic feedback to the operating system, although it won’t be as system-wide as many jailbreak options.

HapticFeedback is a new free jailbreak tweak that also accomplishes this goal, but it also enables haptic feedback for a myriad of other system functions.

Haptic Feedback for everything?

After you install HapticFeedback, you’ll find a preferences pane in the Settings app that lets you configure the haptic feedback you’ll receive. You can control what functions give you haptic feedback, and you can enable or disable the tweak on demand in its entirety.

HapticFeedback preferences pane

Among the things you can enable or disable haptic feedback for are:

  • Locking the device with the sleep button
  • Pressing the Home button
  • Pressing either of the volume buttons
  • Tapping on keyboard keys
  • When unlocking the device

After you are satisfied with your selection, you can tap on the red Save Changes and Respring button to force your device to respring. This will save your changes and you should start feeling haptic feedback when performing the actions you enabled from the Settings.

My thoughts on HapticFeedback

Extended use of the vibrator motor will have an impact on battery life. I’ve always been a fan of haptic feedback, but I’ve always kind of avoided installing tweaks to implement it because I’ve always been strong on preserving battery life.

Nevertheless, this is a great free option for those of you who don’t really care that much because you’ve got the huge iPhone 6 Plus/6s Plus with a massive battery, or because you carry around an external battery regularly.

Personally, I love how haptic feedback feels in my hand when I do things. If the battery drain wasn’t a concern, I would have a haptic feedback tweak on my daily driver.

On some devices, which have different-styled vibrator motors, the vibrations are difficult to feel. I noticed that the tweak leaves a stronger vibration footprint on my iPhone 5 than it does on my iPhone 5s, and for that reason, I would like to see a sensitivity adjustment added to the tweak in the future, as it may help end this problem.

Nevertheless, the tweak works great, and it even works on iOS 9.3.3. Since it’s free, it’s hard to say no.

Wrapping up

HapticFeedback gives your device the ability to give off a light and pleasant vibration in the palm of your hand when you perform certain actions on the device. It’s a free download from Cydia’s BigBoss repository and works on iOS 9.0-9.3.3. Keep in mind that an iPhone is required, as it’s the only device with a vibrating motor inside of it.

Will you add HapticFeedback to your newly-jailbroken iOS 9.3.3 device? Share below!