Prettier Banners adds contacts photos to Messages notifications

Prettier banners

I miss BiteSMS for so many reasons, and one of them is that the tweak adds the photo of your contacts in Messages notifications, assuming you do have a photo for that contact to begin with of course.

Prettier Banners is a new tweak that will certainly fill that void, at least until BiteSMS gets an update. Developed by Mohamed Marbouh, Prettier Banners will replace the Messages app icon with the photo of your contact when receiving a text message notification.

There is no setting to configure for this tweak. Simply download it from Cydia, and wait to receive a message from a friend. If you have assigned a profile photo to this contact in your Contacts/Phone app, then his photo will show in the banner and on the Lock screen.

The tweak works as advertised, as I haven’t encountered any issue during my limited testings. Whether you receive a notification on the Lock or Home screens or while inside an application, the notification will effectively come with a photo of the sender.

I do wish the photo displayed was a bit bigger as it is somewhat hard to easily identify the contacts from the small photos. Hopefully the developer can address this in a future update. Besides that, Prettier Banner is a tweak that I’d feel comfortable recommending to anyone looking for that sort of feature.

Prettier Banners can be downloaded from Cydia’s BigBoss repo for free.

If you do give it a try, make sure to come back here and share your impressions of the tweak.