It’s nothing new for iPhone gamers to have notification banners come up and ruin the full-screen gaming experience. But jailbreakers have long had a way around this thanks to jailbreak tweaks like Nepeta’s NanoBanners.
Fortunately for newer jailbreakers on later versions of iOS, a new and free jailbreak tweak called chhotabanner by iOS developer DrakeDrac, which happens to be a fork of NanoBanners, helps make notification banners less of an aesthetic nuisance while gaming.
As you can see in the screenshot examples above and below, chhotabanner helps remove some of the fluff of iOS’ native notification banner by minimizing its impact on your full-screen game’s viewing experience.
You still get to see the notification’s text and the reason you’re receiving it, but you won’t have all the extra interface elements of the notification banner blocking your in-game content, such as scenery, buttons, and the action in the background, among other things.
Having these blocked by a notification banner can mean the difference between winning or losing a game, so it’s easy to see why jailbreak tweaks like this one are popular among iPhone gamers.
Outside of gaming, it’s also nice for full-screen video playback because it prevents the notification banner from obscuring valuable pixels of your video that would ultimately ruin the viewing experience.
The developer says that chhotabanner is only intended for landscape orientation, so this is something worth keeping in mind if you do any portrait orientation gaming or the likes.
Currently, you can get the open beta of chhotabanner from the project’s GitHub page as a downloadable .deb file. Once downloaded, it can be installed with your package manager app, such as Sileo or Zebra.
The developer says that this tweak should work on iOS & iPadOS 13, 14, 15, and 16, but claims not to have tested iOS & iPadOS 13 or 15. It’s also possible to install this tweak on a “semi-jailbreak,” or otherwise tweak injection via Serotonin using the RootHide bootstrap on non-jailbroken devices susceptible to both the kfd and CoreTrust bugs, but there are some additional steps to take to make it work, as noted on the GitHub page.
Are you planning to give the chhotabanner tweak a try? Let us know why or why not in the comments section down below.