Do you enjoy butterflies? If you answered ‘yes’ to that question, then you might find yourself intrigued by a new, free, and rather conspicuously-named jailbreak tweak dubbed ButterflyEffect by iOS developer Pixelomer.
At first glance, ButterflyEffect causes animated butterfly-themed sprites to flutter over the top of your Home Screen and Lock Screen wallpapers. These animations traverse your screen from the bottom to the top and move slowly enough to be noticed, yet fast enough not to get in the way of your wallpaper viewing pleasure.
ButterflyEffect only appears over wallpaper-based interfaces like the Home Screen and Lock Screen, and so it doesn’t get in the way while using apps or playing games. Below, you’ll find an animated GIF that depicts the animated butterflies in all their glory:
The butterfly-centric animations may be configured to a slight degree, albeit options are limited. Those options will be found in a dedicated preference pane added to the Settings app post-installation:
Here, you can:
- Toggle ButterflyEffect on or off on demand
- Enable or disable animated butterfly 1
- Enable or disable animated butterfly 2
- Enable or disable animated butterfly 3
At first glance, the default butterfly effects may not be as impressive as you’d like, and the good news is that you can add your own butterfly bundles to the tweak by copying and pasting compatible files to /Library/ButterflyEffect/Butterflies with the help of your favorite file manager, such as Filza.
It’s worth noting that these bundles don’t even need to be butterflies — so if butterflies aren’t your thing, then you could technically substitute them with something else.
The developer has made every effort to make ButterflyEffect as battery-friendly as possible, but as with all animation-centric tweaks, you can expect a slight impact on battery life.
Those interested in giving ButterflyEffect a try can download the tweak for free from the Packix repository via their favorite package manager. The tweak supports jailbroken versions of iOS 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14, but for some reason doesn’t support iOS 7. What’s more is that the tweak is open source on the developer’s GitHub page for those interested in learning more about how it works.
Do you plan to try the new ButterflyEffects tweak, even if it’s just to replace the butterflies with something more to your taste? Let us know down in the comments section below.