One thing I’ve long wanted from iOS, but still don’t have to this very day, is a fully-integrated Lock screen experience, complete with notifications, weather information, and widgets in addition to the expected date and time indicator.
While the Today page is a compromising feature on Apple’s behalf, it still doesn’t provide that unified experience I’ve wanted for so long. Fortunately, a newly-released jailbreak tweak called Manta by iOS developer Ben Giannis addresses my complaints with the stock iOS Lock screen, and it does so in an incredibly pleasant manner.
As you can discern for yourself in the screenshot examples above, Manta brings everything together on the first page of your Lock screen for easy information digestion at a glance. You’ll notice that it provides a side-aligned date and time display, news about upcoming events, and an active weather display in addition to missed notifications.
If asked to describe Manta as briefly as possible to my audience, I’d compare it to a lightweight and modernized LockInfo. In a nutshell, it offers many of the same features, just in a more pleasantly presented fashion for the iOS 12 operating system aesthetic.
After installing Manta, you can head over the tweak’s dedicated preference pane in the Settings app to customize it to your personal liking:
Here, you can:
- Toggle Manta on or off on demand
- Choose your preferred Lock screen text alignment:
- Left (default)
- Center
- Right
- Choose a Date and Time font weight:
- UltraLight
- Thin (iOS default)
- Light
- Regular (Manta default)
- Medium
- Semibold
- Bold
- Heavy
- Black
- Enable or disable the calendar event display
- Tint the calendar events with colors
- Ignore all-day events
- Enable or disable the weather display
As you might come to expect, the developer provides a Respring button at the top right of the preference pane, and this allows you to save any changes you make while fine-tuning the tweak for your needs.
When I first laid eyes on Manta, my initial reaction was “heck yes,” and I think you’ll feel the same way after trying it. It’s available for $1.99 from the Havoc repository in any package manager app and supports all jailbroken iOS 12, 13, and 14 devices.
Do you think Manta provides a worthwhile upgrade over the native Lock screen interface on the iPhone? Discuss in the comments section below.