Amalthea: a video-friendly volume HUD for your iOS Status Bar

Amalthea Status Bar Volume iOS

One of the biggest problems with the stock volume HUD in iOS is how it floats in the center of the display and gets in the way of everything you’re doing. The problem is amplified when you’re trying to watch a video and you can’t see what’s going on.

Amalthea is a new jailbreak tweak that relocates the volume indicator to the location of the Status Bar so that it’s up and out of the way.

A better volume indicator

Although this tweak works great for watching videos in any app, it also works throughout iOS, no matter what else you might be doing. Whether you’re in portrait orientation or landscape orientation really doesn’t matter; it leaves the whole screen wide open so you don’t miss a beat.

You can configure the shape of the volume indicator steps between round or square, as well as configure a number of other personalization settings. For my setup, I’ve configured them to be square just like on the stock iOS volume HUD for consistency.

We’ll take you through what you can configure below:

Amalthea Preferences Pane Settings

There are two main divides for the tweak’s settings; 1) Appearance, and 2) Animations.

Within the Appearance preferences pane, you can choose the style, enable or disable dynamic coloring for the volume level, choose the color of the HUD, and hide or show icons in the HUD. Within the animations preferences pane, you can change the duration of the open and close animations until your eyes are satisfied.

Should you get it?

Fresh after the installation, Amalthea reminded me a lot of StatusHUD 2, which is a free tweak alternative that accomplishes a lot of the same functionality. The benefit to Amalthea, however, is you get a few extra bells and whistles to play around with in the settings.

In the end, the look and feel of the volume HUD in the Status Bar is much more lightweight and preferable over stock. To me, it just seems to make a lot more sense having it up there than having a floating pop-up in the middle of the screen that just gets in the way.

Of course, the only thing holding me back from saying this tweak is worth the download is the price tag. The competing tweak StatusHUD 2 isn’t “officially” updated for iOS 9.3.3, but I can attest to the fact that it still works, and it’s completely free to download.

Comparatively, the only options Amalthea seems to support that StatusHUD 2 does not are the dynamic colors, ability to adjust the intro animation speed, and the HUD icons setting. Both tweaks offer the ability to change the style of the indicator steps and include a way to change the dismissal animation speed.

Amalthea is compatible with all jailbroken iOS 9 devices and can be downloaded from Cydia’s BigBoss repository for $1.49.

Do you prefer StatusHUD 2 or Amalthea? Let us know in the comments below!