Wallpapers are a highly personal choice for customizing the look of your Home Screen, but in many cases, images used as wallpapers can make the Home Screen look too busy with all the app icons overlapping everything.
One way to deal with this concern is to apply a blur to said wallpaper image — either as subtle or as powerful as you’d like. You can do this with photo manipulation software before setting an image as your wallpaper on a stock device, or if you’re jailbroken, you can do it directly on the device on the fly. As for how, that’s what we’re about to show you.
Amēlija is a newly released and free jailbreak tweak by iOS developer Luki120 that brings highly customizable blur effects to the Home Screen’s wallpaper. Before (left) and after (right) screenshots can be found below:
As you can see, the blurred effect takes some of your eyes’ attention away from the wallpaper image. You still know it’s there, but all your primary focus becomes set on the app icons instead.
I like this effect a lot — especially given my indecisiveness with wallpapers and much of the time being unable to find images that go nicely with iOS’ flat app icons.
Once installed, users will find a dedicated preference pane in the Settings app where they can configure the tweak to their liking:
Options here include:
- Customizing the Lock Screen wallpaper blur
- Customizing the Home Screen wallpaper blur
Digging deeper, users will find similar options for the aforementioned sections of iOS:
Things you can do for each the Lock Screen and Home Screen wallpaper blurs include:
- Enable or disable epic blur
- Adjust the alpha level of the blur via a slider
- Enable or disable miscellaneous blur effects
- Choose a miscellaneous blur effect:
- Dark
- Light
- Adaptive
- Prominent
- System thin
- System ultra thin
- System chrome material
- Adjust the alpha level of the blur
One thing I like about Amēlija is that you don’t have to respring your device to see your changes. This means you can see everything you’re doing in real time to see if it’s going to work for you or not.
Those interested in giving Amēlija a try can download the tweak for free from the Twickd repository via their favorite package manager. The tweak supports jailbroken iOS 14 devices and is open source on the developer’s GitHub page.
What are your thoughts on blurring your Lock Screej or Home Screen wallpaper? I think it’s best for those who like colors as opposed to images, but everyone has their own preference. Be sure to let us know your position in the comments section down below.