Starting with last year’s iPhone X, Apple nixed the Home Button from its entire lineup of smartphones and replaced it with the software-based Home Bar. The Home Bar resides at the bottom of your display, quietly waiting for upward swipe gestures for unlocking the handset or closing foregrounded apps.
The Home Bar compliments the iOS experience like bread and butter, and it also empowered Apple to achieve the signature edge-to-edge OLED display that many of us know and love, but it’s not without its quirks. Fortunately, a new free jailbreak tweak called XEdgeProtect by iOS developer smokin1337 addresses some of these issues.
One of the primary complaints surrounding the Home Bar encompasses how it’s too easy to close an app by accident; this is particularly noticeable when playing a game like Pokémon GO, and you accidentally swipe up on the Home Bar while attempting to throw that excellent curveball at a wild Pokémon. Notice how close the Home Bar sits to the Pokéball in the example below:
In addition to improved app compatibility, XEdgeProtect promises to reduce conflicts between the Home Bar and several other jailbreak tweaks in Cydia, such as FloatyDock. We imagine there are many others out there, but we don’t exactly have a jailbroken iPhone X in our possession to relate.
XEdgeProtect resolves these problems by converting the Home Bar swipe gesture into a two-step process. Post-installation, the Home Bar automatically dims after a period inactivity, preventing it from being invoked on your first swipe. After you’ve swiped up the Home Bar once, it brightens up and can be swiped up again to perform its natural function. Easy peasy!
For now, XEdgeProtect is only intended for devices that sport a native Home Bar, such as the iPhone X. The iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max would also be included in that list if a publicly-available jailbreak actually existed for them.
Citing the tweak’s Cydia description, XEdgeProtect may also work with non-iPhone X handsets if you use a Home Bar emulation tweak like LittleX or HomeGesture, but these combinations have not been thoroughly tested; that said, you try it at your own risk.
If you’re interested in trying XEdgeProtect, then you can download it for free from Cydia’s Packix repository. The tweak is intended to work on jailbroken iPhone X handsets only.
What do you think about the idea behind XEdgeProtect? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.