Take control of iOS’s atrocious stock volume HUD with SmartVolumeControl2

Apple publicly released iOS 12 this week, and despite all the new features baked into it, one thing that still hasn’t changed after all these years is that dreadful volume HUD that pops up any time you press either of the volume buttons.

Apple made some remarkable improvements to the video player-centric volume HUD with iOS 11, but for whatever reason, the global volume HUD lagged behind. Fortunately, a new jailbreak tweak dubbed SmartVolumeControl2 by iOS developer midkin fixes this.

If the name sounds familiar, that’s because the tweak is based off the original SmartVolumeControl from late-2016. SmartVolumeControl2 is a complete re-write of the original and packs eight different skins intended to make iOS’ volume HUD look nicer.

In the screenshot examples above, we show you three of our favorite styles that come bundled with SmartVolumeControl2.

But SmartVolumeControl2 doesn’t end with a volume HUD facelift, it also brings functional touch controls to the volume HUD. When the volume HUD appears on your display after the initial volume button press, you can then touch and drag on it to adjust your volume level.

After installation, you’ll find a preference pane in the Settings app where you can configure a few options:

Here, you can:

  • Choose the skin/style you want to use
  • Configure a custom volume step
  • Adjust the volume HUD fade-away delay
  • Enable fast-mute
  • Toggle Lock screen volume on or off
  • Wake up the screen when adjusting the volume
  • Configure Activator integration
  • Toggle preference pane UI decoration on/off

In the skin/style options, you can choose from any of the following:

 

  • Apple-style volume HUD
  • YouTube-style volume HUD
  • WhatsApp-style volume HUD
  • Twitter-style volume HUD
  • ConceptX-style volume HUD
  • ConceptX2-style volume HUD
  • iOS11Player-style volume HUD
  • iOS11Slider-style volume HUD

And lastly, you can configure a few advanced options:

  • Enable haptic feedback for minimum and maximum volume
  • Enable haptic feedback for every volume step
  • Select haptic feedback strength
  • Colorize volume level steps
  • Make volume level black if using the ConceptX skin
  • Customize the YouTube skin
  • And more…

If you really can’t stand that atrocious stock volume HUD in iOS, then SmartVolumeControl2 is a must-have tweak. You can download the tweak for free from Cydia’s BigBoss repository, but you’ll need to pay $1.99 from the tweak’s preference pane to activate it after installation.

SmartVolumeControl2 plays nicely with all jailbroken handsets running iOS 7-11, including iPhones and iPads. For more information, and to request new features, you can visit the developer’s website.

Will you be grabbing SmartVolumeControl2 to augment your handset’s volume HUD experience? Let us know in the comments section below.