Photon brings an ambient display to jailbroken devices

If you’ve got a jailbroken iOS device at your disposal and you’re in the market for a really cool new display experience for your iPhone, then you should probably take a few minutes to check out this new jailbreak tweak release called Photon by iOS developer cemck.

Photon appears to be a true ambient display experience for the Lock screen on iOS devices, and it displays pertinent information using a variety of different methods and in combination with existing popular Lock screen-centric tweaks such as Complications, Grupi, Jellyfish, Sylph, Xen HTML, and many others.

As you’ll notice in the screenshot examples above and below, Photon gets inspiration for many of its interface displays from the Apple Watch, and it can be configured to be always-on just like your Apple Watch for a stunning nightstand companion or to go to sleep after a configured period of time. Best of all, Photon works with virtually any iOS device (but looks best on OLED display-equipped handsets) and is super easy to set up.

Right out of the box, Photon comes with three different display modes, including minimal, which will save the most battery on OLED display-equipped handsets due to the number of unused pixels that don’t illuminate when true black is used, modular, which looks and works best with other jailbreak tweaks, and Watch Faces, which as you might come to expect, get their inspiration from the Apple Watch itself.

Once installed, users will find a dedicated preference pane in the Settings app where they can configure Photon to their liking:

Here, you’ll be able to:

  • Toggle Photon on or off on demand
  • Choose between Minimal, Modular, and Watch Face styles
  • Configure your style of choice
  • Configure always-on display mode
  • Configure haptic feedback

Digging deeper, you’ll find the following options for the different Photon styles:

Minimal Style

  • Enable Apple Watch font for the time and date
  • Center the time and date on the display
  • Enable Jellyfish compatibility mode

Modular Style

  • Enable Apple Watch font for the time and date
  • Outline the time font
  • Enable and configure Lock screen widgets
  • Enable Jellyfish compatibility mode

Face Style

  • Choose the Apple Watch face style you want to use

In the always-on display preference pane, you can:

  • Enable or disable the always-on display
  • Only use always-on display while charging (or when docked at your charging stand)
  • Dim the always-on display after idle time
  • Enable Low Power Mode when always-on display is showing
  • Enable OLED protection to prevent screen burn-in
  • Enable pocket detection to turn the display off when the proximity sensor detects your pocket
  • Enable inactivity protection to turn off the always-on display after prolonged inactivity

In the haptics preference pane, you can:

  • Configure the number of taps required to dismiss Photon
  • Toggle haptic feedback on or off for when dismissing Photon
  • Enable raise to wake

The developer provides a means of Respringing from the primary preference pane, and this will be required when changing most of the tweak’s settings to save them.

All-in-all, Photon looks like a solid investment for upgrading that stock-like iPhone that you’ve been keeping in your pocket all this time. The tweak is available for $2.99 from the Havoc repository and supports jailbroken iOS 13 and 14 devices.

Do you plan to give Photon a try? Let us know why or why not in the comments section below.