Originally designed to make one-handed use of larger-displayed iPhones easier, Reachability is an often underused feature that holds a lot of potential.
The jailbreak community knows all about this potential, as jailbreak tweaks are seemingly always trying to make better use of the space at the top of the display upon summoning Reachability.
The latest of such releases is a new tweak called PowerReach by iOS developer smokin1337, which fills the void with useful power down options and device information:
As you can see for yourself in the various screenshot examples above, the tweak displays the current date and time in addition to your battery level percentage. The latter is particularly useful since newer notched iPhones no longer offer a numeric battery percentage in the Status Bar.
Moving past that, the tweak also offers configurable shortcuts for SBReload, Safe Mode, UICache, Userspace Reboot, Shut Down, and Reboot. These power options are useful in various troubleshooting instances, and it’s nice that the developer provides so many of them.
Once installed, PowerReach adds a dedicated preference pane to the Settings app where users may configure the tweak to their liking:
Options here include:
- Pressing both volume buttons to activate Reachability
- Shaking the device to activate Reachability
- Disabling the default timeout timer
- Enabling and configuring a menu background color
- Enabling and adjusting the background blur intensity via a slider
- Choosing a background blur style:
- Ultra thin
- Thin
- Normal
- Thick
- Chrome
- Enabling and configuring a glow effect
- Choosing a glow color
- Adjusting the glow opacity via a slider
- Adjusting the glow radius via a slider
- Enabling and adjusting the border via a slider
- Changing the border color
- Enabling and configuring a custom backlight color
- Adjusting the backlight opacity via a slider
- Adjusting the backlight radius via a slider
- Toggle individual PowerReach items on or off and colorize them to your liking:
- Date/Time
- Battery Info
- Respring button
- Safe Mode button
- UICache button
- Userspace reboot button
- LDRestart button
- Shut Down button
- Reboot button
- And more…
One of the things we really like about PowerReach is that you can choose what types of shortcuts appear in the interface and then pick how they’re going to look. This means your interface can be just as beautiful as it is functional — depending on how you set it up.
Those who’d like to try PowerReach out for themselves can purchase the tweak for $1.29 from the Packix repository via their favorite package manager app. The tweak supports jailbroken iOS 13 and 14 devices.
How will you use PowerReach to augment the Reachability interface on your jailbroken handset? We’re excited to hear from you in the comments section down below.