LockApps brings an expandable app shortcut drawer to your iPhone’s Lock Screen

The iPhone’s Lock Screen user experience is both simple and user-friendly. But if you’re a power user, then you might find yourself demanding more, especially if you favor functionality over user-friendliness.

iOS developer ginsudev strikes a favorable balance between the two with the release of a new jailbreak tweak called LockApps, as it replaces the Lock Screen’s standalone Camera app shortcut with one that points to an app drawer-like page containing all the apps you want faster access to.

Once installed, a new shortcut button appears in place of the Lock Screen’s Camera app shortcut that contains three small squares. The screenshot examples above depict this, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the small squares represent app icons:

The process of accessing the app drawer-styled shortcut page is identical to accessing the Camera from the Lock Screen before installing LockApps. In essence, you can either use a 3D Touch/Haptic Touch gesture on the dedicated shortcut button itself, or you can just swipe your Lock Screen from the left to the right.

Those who demand some kind of configuration will be excited to learn that LockApps certainly provides it:

From the dedicated preference pane found in the Settings app post-installation, users can:

  • Toggle LockApps on or off on demand
  • Choose which apps appear in the app drawer-styled shortcut interface
  • Select how many app icons appear in each row (1 ,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8)

The developer provides an Apply button at the top-right of the preference pane so that you can save whatever changes you’ve made to the tweak’s options.

One of the things I really like about LockApps is that trying to launch apps from the Lock Screen from the app drawer-like interface still prompts the user to authenticate themselves with biometrics such as Face ID or Touch ID or with a passcode. This means that you can still access your favorite apps more quickly, but without sacrificing personal privacy or security.

Please note that a similarly-named tweak was released almost two years ago, however this release by ginsudev does something entirely different in that it provides Lock Screen-based app shortcuts instead of locking individual apps.

Those interested in trying the new LockApps tweak for themselves can download it for free from Ginsu’s personal repository via their favorite package manager app. Worthy of note, LockApps supports both iPhones and iPads running jailbroken installations of iOS & iPadOS 14.

If you’re not already using Ginsu’s personal repository, then you can add it to your package manager app with the URL provided below:

https://ginsudev.github.io/repo/

What are your thoughts about the app drawer-styled app shortcut mechanisms afforded by LockApps? Be sure to let us know what you think about the tweak in the comments section down below.