GrabberEX lets you discern the time and battery percentage more easily in full-screen apps

I like that I can always glance at my Status Bar to see the time or even how much of my battery I have left before I’ll need to need to connect to a charger.

Unfortunately, full-screen apps hide the Status Bar, and pulling down from the top of the display to glance at the Status Bar in Notification Center reveals a grabber instead. This, in turn, necessitates a secondary pull down gesture to view the Status Bar in Notification Center.

The entire experience mentioned above is cumbersome, and that’s why I always try to use jailbreak tweaks like GrabberEX by iOS developer XQF when available. In a nutshell, it saves you from having to swipe down twice just to check the time or see your battery remainder.

As you’ll notice in the screenshot example above, GrabberEX displays the time and battery percentage inside of the grabber itself. This means you won’t have to go through the process of opening Notification Center just to peek at these valuable tidbits of information.

Once installed, the tweak adds a preference pane to the Settings app where users can configure a few options:

Things you can do here include:

  • Toggle 24-hour time on or off
  • Select a custom text color
  • Select a custom grabber label color

What’s more is combined with another newly released and free jailbreak tweak called GrabberInApps by the same developer, you can achieve this same functionality in apps such as Plex, VLC, and YouTube where it normally wouldn’t work.

Given just how important being able to keep track of time and your battery level are to most people, it’s insane that Apple hasn’t implemented something like this out of the box by now. After all, this idea has been floating around in the jailbreak community for years, and Apple is known for poaching talent and ideas from our community year after year.

Both GrabberEX and GrabberInApps are available to download for free from the Twickd repository via your favorite package manager and support jailbroken iOS 14 devices.

Do you plan on installing GrabberEX and/or GrabberInApps to augment your time-telling and battery level discerning capabilities while using full-screen apps? Be sure to let us know in the comments section down below.