AOD brings an Android-style always-on-display to jailbroken iPhones

One of the cool things that several Android handsets have that the iPhone doesn’t is an always-on-display, which, for those who don’t know, continuously displays information on the Lock screen of OLED display-equipped handsets without ever shutting off, such as the time and any missed notifications. Fortunately for jailbreakers, this is no longer an Android-only feature.

With the help of a newly released jailbreak tweak dubbed AOD by iOS developer Soh Satoh, you can enjoy a true always-on-display experience on jailbroken devices running iOS 12, and while it works best on handsets equipped with OLED displays, it should work with LCD displays too.

At first glance, the tweak is gorgeous. It displays the time, date, battery level, and important notifications at a glance at all times. Perhaps more importantly, the tweak can be customized to look and behave how you want it to.

Here’s a video demonstration of AOD provided by the developer:

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After installing AOD, you’ll find a dedicated preference pane in the Settings app where you can configure it how you want:

Here, you can:

  • Toggle AOD on or off on demand
  • Enable Low Power Mode while AOD shows information
  • Disable AOD when Do Not Disturb mode is turned on
  • Disable AOD when your handset is in your pocket
  • Disable tap to wake
  • Hide or show the battery level
  • Hide or show Now Playing information
  • Hide or show icon fade animations
  • Enable grayscale icons
  • Change the icon size via slider
  • Change the space between icons via slider
  • Mode labels via slider
  • Configure a preferred always-on-display brightness level via slider

A respring is needed to save any changes you make here; fortunately, the developer provides a way to respring right from the preference pane.

As you might come to expect, an always-on-display will eat more battery than an always-off-display, and so we like that the developer was conscious about that by integrating features such as Do Not Disturb and pocket awareness to prevent the tweak from activating when it doesn’t need to.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tweak does use more of your handset’s battery, but not as much on a device equipped with an OLED display as it would on a device equipped with an LCD display because individual pixels can be turned completely off to designate the color black on the former, while the latter uses more power to lighten every pixel; even black ones. For this reason, we can only really recommend the tweak to users of iPhones with OLED displays, such as the iPhone X, XS, and XS Max.

If you’re interested in equipping your jailbroken device with an Android-style always-on-display, then you can download AOD from the Havoc repository in Cydia or Sileo for $1.99. The tweak supports all jailbroken iOS 12 and 13 devices.