All of Apple’s notched devices, iPhones and iPads alike, come equipped with a software alternative to the Home Button known as the Home Bar — the thin line that manifests itself at the bottom-center of the display.
I love the Home Bar as an alternative to the antiquated Home Button, especially when paired with the bigger edge-to-edge displays that modern iPhones and iPads now possess. But with a jailbreak, it’s possible to make the Home Bar even better than it already is.
MediaBar14 is a jailbreak tweak by iOS developer MegaDev that supercharges the Home Bar with additional features — more specifically, with controls for managing your media playback.
As you’ll see in the screenshot examples above, MediaBar14 turns the main Home Bar into a media progress bar that shows how far into a music track you are. It also incorporates complementary Back, Forward, Play, and Pause buttons, allowing you to control media playback on demand.
We especially like MediaBar14 for its subtle footprint and powerful media playback accessibility, which is notable given that the Home Bar appears almost everywhere throughout the operating system.
If the tweak sounds familiar, that’s because it is. We previously showed you the original MediaBar last year, but MediaBar14 has been rewritten from scratch with optimizations for iOS & iPadOS 14 in mind.
Once installed, MediaBar14 adds a dedicated preference pane to the Settings app where users can configure a number of options:
Here, you can:
- Toggle MediaBar14 on or off on demand
- Hide or show the title background
- Hide or show the Lock Screen’s Now Playing widget
- Always show the player whether media is playing or not
- Enable or disable swiping to skip 15 seconds
- Adjust the fade out speed via a slider
- Adjust the Home Bar width via a slider
- Enable or disable dynamic artwork colors
- Enable or disable Home Bar colorization
- Enable or disable resetting the Home Bar color when music pauses
- Reset all options to their defaults
- Respring to save changes
Those who purchased the original MediaBar tweak can upgrade to the latest version for free, and should be receiving an email with instructions to transfer the license. If you haven’t already purchased the tweak, then it’s available for $1.49 from the Chariz repository via your favorite package manager. MediaBar14 supports jailbroken iOS & iPadOS 14 devices and is compatible with Little12 on non-notched devices.
Will you be upgrading your handset’s Home Bar with MediaBar14? Let us know in the comments section down below.