Tractor brings much-needed improvements to the Music widget

If you feel like iOS’ stock Music widget leaves a lot to be desired, then you aren’t alone. In fact, iOS developer LaughingQuoll recently released a new free jailbreak tweak dubbed Tractor with the intention of improving Apple’s sad excuse for a Music widget.

In the before and after screenshots above, you can see how Tractor revitalizes the Music widget’s usefulness. Rather than displaying a list of available music inside the widget, Tractor implements the traditional music controls that you’d expect to see there.

Among the controls Tractor adds to the Music widget are play/pause, fast-forward, and rewind. These controls serve the same purpose as their counterparts that display inside the Music app and on the Lock screen whenever you have media playing.

Tractor may seem familiar, and that’s because it appeared in last week’s jailbreak tweaks of the week roundup, and it wasn’t free at the time. It was released as a part of LaughingQuoll’s Patreon Early Access program, which enables subscribers to download jailbreaks tweaks in beta stages for a recurring fee.

Now that Tractor is officially out of beta, jailbreakers can download the tweak for free from Cydia’s Packix repository. Tractor doesn’t have any options to configure and is compatible with jailbroken iOS 10 and 11 devices with 3D Touch capability.

Pro tip: Tractor plays nicely with 3D Touch emulation tweaks such as Force3DAppShortcuts and Peek-A-Boo on devices that don’t support 3D Touch gestures out of the box.

Do you think Tractor makes the Music widget more useful? Share in the comments below.