Modernize your iPhone’s App Switcher experience with Spear

There’s no shortage of jailbreak tweaks that try to improve the iPhone’s native App Switcher, but one of the latest concepts to have caught my eye is a new release dubbed Spear by iOS developer Dylan West (iOSthemem0d).

Spear not only replaces the native App Switcher interface with a better looking one, but it adds useful new functionality that most iPhone users are likely to find particularly useful. As depicted in the screenshot examples above, Spear incorporates a swipe-up interface at the bottom of the App Switcher that contains shortcuts and toggles, among other things.

While Spear sort of looks like a combination between the App Switcher and Control Center, it really isn’t. The interface adopts some Control Center toggles and shortcuts, including Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, Data, Bluetooth, Brightness, and Volume, but it also brings other unique shortcuts to the table, including Respring, Safe Mode, UICache, power down, Camera, flashlight, and a button to force-quit all suspended apps in one fell swoop.

As you might come to expect, the Spear interface is customizable, and users will find a dedicated preference pane in the Settings app after installation:

Here, you can:

  • Toggle Spear on or off on demand
  • View a usage tutorial
  • Configure spear
  • Reset all settings to their defaults
  • Apply any changes you’ve made

Digging deeper into the configuration cell, users will find the following sections:

  • Choosing between an adaptive and color-based appearance
  • Blacklisting Spear for certain apps for which it doesn’t play nicely with
  • Customize miscellaneous settings in relation to Spear
  • Customize Spear’s color and aesthetics

In the Miscellaneous preference pane, users can:

 

  • Toggle the date and time display on or off on demand
  • Choose between a left or right-aligned date and time display
  • Configure a date and time font weight
  • Adjust the date and time color
  • Choose your preferred icon appearance
  • Enable custom switcher card scaling and adjust with a slider
  • Hide the suggestion banner
  • Hide app icons and their labels
  • Enable and configure custom colors for app labels

In the Colors preference pane, users can:

  • Choose custom colors for each of the following Spear elements:
    • Background
    • Container background
    • Pill background
    • Top row buttons
    • Top row image tint
    • Torch off image tint
    • Torch on image tint
    • Brightness & volume slider background
    • Brightness & volume Slider foreground
    • Brightness & volume slider border
    • Connectivity button
    • Connectivity enabled button
    • Connectivity disabled button
    • Power module button
    • Power module image tint

All parts of Spear have been tested on the latest version of iOS 13 at the time of this writing and should play nicely with all jailbroken installations of iOS 13 even if it isn’t the latest. According to the developer, the tweak is only intended for iPhones, excluding the iPhone SE 1st generation, which means iPad users are out of luck.

If you’re interested in giving Spear a try, then you can purchase it for $1.99 from the Twickd repository via your favorite package manager.

Will you be upgrading your jailbroken iPhone’s App Switcher experience with Spear? Discuss in the comments section below.