When your iPhone is locked, iOS will try to mask the contents of your Lock Screen’s incoming notification banners until you authenticate yourself so that onlookers who shouldn’t be snooping on your notifications won’t be able to in the first place.
This is a brilliant privacy feature on Apple’s part, and such a feature may also have uses when your iPhone is unlocked, such as when showing a friend or co-worker your iPhone’s screen to look at a photo or video and an unexpected notification banner pops up.
I generally use Do Not Disturb mode when showing someone else my iPhone’s screen, just to prevent personal messages from popping up in notification banners. But Avya is a free jailbreak tweak by iOS developer blackstar that offers an alternative way to hide notification banners when sharing your screen and with many other new features being promised in future updates.
Once installed, users can choose when and where notification banners will be subdued. In the before (left) and after (right) images above, you can see how banner notifications appear when the tweak is disabled and how they don’t when the tweak is enabled.
Avya can be universally toggled on or off in its entirety from a dedicated preference pane in the Settings app, while the actual notification-hiding capabilities can be toggled on or off on demand via an Activator action:
In this case, we’ve selected pressing both the volume up and down buttons at the same time since this is something that’s easy to do from just about anywhere in iOS.
Avya offers a smidge of haptic feedback when toggling the tweak on or off, which is particularly nice since you can easily discern if the feature has been bumped on by accident.
At this time. Avya is fairly barebones with not much extra to offer over the stock Do Not Disturb feature besides haptic feedback alongside the Activator support, but the developer plans to incorporate additional features such as a Status Bar dot indicator to remind you when the feature is turned on, a Control Center toggle, the ability to include or exclude certain apps, a timer to automatically disable the tweak, hide notifications if sent by specific contacts, and much more.
If you’re interested in giving Avya a try, then you can download it for free from the Packix repository via your favorite package manager app. The tweak supports jailbroken iOS 14 devices and is open source on the developer’s GitHub page.
Do you plan to better protect your notification privacy with Avya, or are you going to continue using Do Not Disturb? Be sure to let us know in the comments section down below.