If you’re one to appreciate fun and quirky animations on your jailbroken iPhone or iPad, then a new free jailbreak tweak called Ants by iOS developer SparkDev might be of interest to you.
Once installed, Ants causes an army of animated virtual ants to spawn all over the iOS interface. They appear and crawl around whether you’re on your Home screen or inside of an app.
Curious how it looks on the Home screen? Just check out the animated GIF below:
And here’s another animated GIF depicting how the Ants tweak looks in an app:
Ants adds a preference pane to the Settings app where you can configure a few options:
Here, you can:
- Toggle the tweak on or off on demand
- Choose the maximum number of ants that can spawn at once (more ants requires more system resources)
- Configure the spawn rate for the ants
- Use the Accelerometer to impact ant physics
The developer includes a Respring button in the preference pane so that you can save your changes on demand.
As SparkDev noted on Twitter, Ants is a remake of a classic jailbreak tweak that was initially released when jailbreaking iPhone OS 1.1 was a thing. If you don’t remember, iPhone OS 1.1 launched more than 11 years ago, and the concept behind Ants isn’t much younger.
The source code for the original jailbreak tweak is available online for everyone to observe and tweak to their liking, which is why SparkDev took a crack at making the tweak compatible with some of the latest jailbroken iterations of iOS, including iOS 10 and iOS 11.
Keep in mind that Ants is considered to be in its beta stages as of this writing. If you’re interested in trying Ants on your jailbroken handset, then you can download it for free from SparkDev’s beta repository in Cydia. If you haven’t already added SparkDev’s beta repository, then be sure to grab it from our comprehensive list of third-party Cydia repositories.
Are you nostalgic over the recreation of this classic jailbreak tweak? Lets us know in the comments below.