I love how convenient Control Center makes it to toggle my iPhone or iPad’s controls on or off in a pinch, but I’m almost certain that anyone who’d grab my iPhone when I’m not looking might feel exactly the same way. In fact, Control Center makes it far too easy for a thief or mischief-maker to toggle Airplane Mode as a hindrance to handset recovery, and that’s enough to make anyone second-guess the added convenience…

Grounded is a brand new and free jailbreak tweak by iOS developer biD3V that’s designed to prevent such issues from living rent-free in your head. The tweak works by allowing users to make certain Control Center toggles unusable as long as your iPhone or iPad is locked, but they become usable the moment you authenticate yourself.

As depicted in the screenshot example above, Grounded dims all ‘disabled’ toggles to give the aesthetic that they’re inaccessible. When you unlock your handset, the buttons light back up again, welcoming the user to tap on them as necessary to control their handset’s features.

Once installed, Grounded adds a preference pane to the Settings app where users can toggle the tweak on or off on demand and choose which toggles are disabled as long as the handset remains locked:

Supported toggles include:

  • Airplane Mode
  • Cellular Data
  • Wi-Fi
  • Bluetooth
  • AirDrop
  • Personal Hotspot

We like the concept that Grounded brings to the table, not only because it makes it more difficult for someone to tap on your iPhone or iPad’s Control Center toggles without your permission, but also because it feels proper given just how vital some of these toggles are to your handset’s function and yet how easy they are to tap from just about anywhere – locked or not.

Having the toggles disabled until the device becomes authenticated is a better solution than disabling Control Center features outright, because the latter would make your device less convenient to use. That’s one reason why I’d recommend the Grounded tweak to all jailbreakers.

Those interested in trying Grounded can download the tweak for free from biD3V’s personal repository via their favorite package manager. The tweak supports jailbroken iOS 13 devices.

If you’re not already using biD3V’s repository, then you can add it to your package manager of choice with the following URL:

https://bid3v.github.io/repo/

Do you have plans to give Grounded a try? Discuss why or why not in the comments section down below.