When you place or receive a phone call on your iPhone, the speaker option can be incredibly useful when you don’t plan to hold the handset up to your ear.
Image Source: /r/jailbreak.
Unfortunately, the process to toggle speaker phone mode can be cumbersome when you have a paired device in range, such as headphones, a Bluetooth speaker, or even a nearby iOS or macOS device since the speaker button will display a menu asking you to select a device for sound output when tapped.
Since speaker phone mode is so commonly used while driving for a hands-free calling experience when CarPlay isn’t an option, it’s easy to see how having to select a specific device from a menu can be troublesome. Fortunately, iOS developer udevs is out with a solution in the form of a new and free jailbreak tweak dubbed SpeakerFirst.
SpeakerFirst prioritizes the speaker phone option when tapping on the speaker button in the Phone app’s calling interface. Once installed, tapping the button switches you to speaker phone mode instead of summoning a menu for you to select a sound output device.
You can still access the sound output device menu if needed by tapping and holding on the calling interface’s speaker button – this is how it should have been from the start. A request post published to /r/jailbreak, followed by a stream of comments, validate this notion.
Since the primary goal of the tweak is to make accessing speaker phone mode less of a nuisance, we would say it accomplishes this objective easily by preventing users from having to jump through superfluous hoops to use a feature as simple as that of speaker phone mode.
Those interested in giving SpeakerFirst a try can download it for free from udevs’ personal repository via their favorite package manager app. The tweak supports jailbroken iOS 14 devices and doesn’t have any options to configure.
Of course, if you’re not already using udevs’ personal repository, then you can add it to your package manager app by using the URL provided below:
https://udevsharold.github.io/repo/
Do you plan to change the way you access speaker phone mode in the native Phone app’s calling interface with the new SpeakerFirst tweak? Be sure to let us know why or why not in the comments section down below.