Anthony Bouchard

Anthony Bouchard joined the iDownloadBlog.com team in 2016 after originally covering Apple and iPhone jailbreak news at ModMyi.com. As an experienced editor, he brings more than 15 years’ worth of jailbreaking knowledge to our in-depth guides, opinion pieces, and news articles. His passion for device customization and user choice sparks his strong push to empower readers with the tools they need to explore and enjoy the freedom that comes with jailbreaking. Anthony blogs about not only jailbreaking, but also Apple software & accessories, drones & photography, and Nintendo gaming systems. Anthony honed his advanced technical knowledge over the years with hands-on projects ranging from gaming PC builds to engine repair mechanics. His never-ending hunger for knowledge is why you’ll always find him tinkering – tearing things apart and putting them back together to understand what makes them tick.

Jailbreak tweaks of the week: FPSIndicator, Library Card, SettingsButtons, & more…

Things have felt slower than usual with regard to jailbreak tweak releases recently, but that’s to be expected when iOS & iPadOS 14 aren’t ideally jailbreakable on every available device as of yet.

Regardless, we’re back with yet another roundup encompassing all the jailbreak tweak releases and the best jailbreak news to keep you apprised as it happens. This roundup will go over everything from Monday, December 7th to Sunday, December 13th.

SettingsButtons adds useful buttons to the Navigation Bar in the Settings app

Jailbreakers with any interest or intention involving the augmentation of their iPhone or iPad’s Settings application should promptly turn their attention to a newly released and free jailbreak tweak dubbed SettingsButtons by iOS developer Ethan Whited.

SettingsButtons provides fast and easy access to commonly used toggles directly from the Settings app’s Navigation Bar, including but not limited to a Dark Mode toggle, a Respring button, and a Safe Mode button. Examples of these buttons are depicted in the screenshot example above.

This jailbreak tweak adds a frames-per-second indicator to any mobile game

While most serious gamers out there are using either a console or a powerful home-built gaming PC, the fact remains that some gamers like to take their games with them on their travels with the help of their smartphones and tablets.

While the mobile gaming experience isn’t nearly the same as it would be on a stationary system, elite gamers may still take their mobile system performance seriously. This may explain why a newly released and free jailbreak tweak called FPSIndicator by iOS developer Brend0n is now available.

Library Card lets iPad users hide apps to the App Library

One of the new features to ship with iOS 14 is the App Library. Some people like the App Library because it lets them hide seldom used apps from the Home Screen and without the added clutter of folders, while others dislike it because they have less control over how apps are organized as opposed to creating and managing their own folders. Hiding apps to the App Library is optional, but one thing that struck me as odd is that it’s only available for the iPhone.

Library Card is a newly released and free jailbreak tweak by iOS developer garrepi that ports at least one of the App Library’s key features to jailbroken iPads running iPadOS 14. While it won’t bring the full blown App Library functionality like what we have on the iPhone with iOS 14 to the iPad, it will permit iPad users to hide apps from the Home Screen that they don’t use often without outright deleting them.

Boost the aesthetics of your jailbroken iPhone’s Lock Screen with Heartlines

For some people, the Lock Screen is nothing more than a barrier that resides between the user and the apps on their device. For others, it’s the first interface you see every time you pick up your iPhone. Regardless of which camp you side with, wouldn’t you prefer to look at a more aesthetically pleasing Lock Screen design?

Heartlines is a newly released and free jailbreak tweak by iOS developer Litten that provides three new Lock Screen styles for the iOS platform, and beyond that, it offers a plethora of configuration options that allow users to get the most out of the first interface they see every time they pick up their handset. How’s that for awesome?

KernBypass kernel-level jailbreak detection bypass updated to v0.0.5 with iOS 14.2 support & more

Matrix code hacked iPhone.

Earlier this year, iOS developer XsF1re garnered a substantial amount of attention from the jailbreak community after releasing the FlyJB kernel-level jailbreak detection bypassafter releasing the FlyJB kernel-level jailbreak detection bypass — a tool that was basically meant to amount to a way for jailbreakers to go undetected by App Store apps that would traditionally bar access to those with pwned handsets.

Soon after, XsF1re pulled the project, citing a loss of confidence, but later reinstated it as FlyJB X upon developing improvements to make the bypass more reliable. Still, it wasn’t without its shortcomings. Over the weekend, however, iOS developer Ichitaso updated his own kernel-level jailbreak detection bypass dubbed KernBypass (unofficial) to version 0.0.5, and from what we can gather, it just might be slightly superior.

Jailbreak tweaks of the week: Ekip, Grounded, Snoverlay 2, & more…

Now that the Odyssey jailbreak tool supports up to iOS & iPadOS 13.7 on all compatible devices, more avid jailbreakers have access to the perks of a seemingly endless cache of jailbreak tweaks and extensions that can be used to make their handset more unique.

In this roundup, we’ll discuss the latest jailbreak tweak releases from Monday, November 30th to Sunday, December 6th. As always, we’ll start things off with a brief overview of our favorite releases and then wrap things up with an outline of the rest and other important jailbreak news tidbits afterward.

Put your notched iPhone’s Tab Bar on a diet with Home Slice

If you’ve owned any of Apple’s notched iPhones, be it the tried-and-true iPhone X, the shiny new iPhone 12 Pro, or a device residing somewhere between the two aforementioned handsets, then you likely know first-hand just how much real estate iOS wastes in the Tab Bar region of the display.

Fortunately for anyone who might be jailbroken, there’s a way to reclaim all of those wasted pixels, and it exists in the form of a newly released and free jailbreak tweak dubbed Home Slice by iOS developer biD3V.

NitoTV open-sources ‘vpnd’ project, enabling VPNs to run on jailbroken Apple TVs

About a month ago, Guardian Firewall VPN founder and CEO Will Strafach, a former member of the Chronic Dev Team, shared a particularly exciting announcement in that nitoTV (now going by @freenitoTV on Twitter) had gotten VPN connections working on the Apple TV platform for the very first time; albeit with a jailbreak.

The aforementioned jaw-dropping feat demanded tons of complicated hackery, but after lots of research, development, testing, and refinement, the project, officially dubbed “vpnd,” is now available for jailbreakers who might want to try their hand at configuring a VPN connection on their own Apple TV.

Jailbreakers can get festive with Snoverlay 2, which adds animated snowflakes to any interface

The most wonderful time of the year is rapidly approaching once more, and lots of families will be turning to festivities as a means of drowning out the absolute horrors that 2020 brought to families all over the globe.

If you’re one of the millions who will be celebrating the holidays this year, then why stop at household decorations and holiday baking when you can trick out your iPhone or iPad too? Apart from setting a festive wallpaper, a newly released and free jailbreak tweak called Snoverlay 2 by iOS developer Ryan Nair can make animated snowflakes rain over the top of every interface you view on your handset.

AnimeMyBadges brings a unique breathing animation to notification badges

After receiving a notification from one of your apps, iOS and iPadOS put a badge on the Home Screen’s app icon to alert you to missed and/or pending notifications. The badge appears as a static red dot at the top-right of the icon, and while we’ve seen jailbreak tweaks-a-plenty that permit color customization of these badges, tweaks for animating said badges seem to be far less common.

Enter AnimeMyBadges, a newly released and free jailbreak tweak by iOS developer Antony M that gives Your handset’s notification badges a unique breathing animation that causes them to wax and wane with what can only be described as the in-and-out rhythm of a breath.

AngryDuolingo makes the Duolingo app icon look angry when notifications are missed

Duolingo is perhaps one of the most popular apps for learning a new language available on the iOS and iPadOS  platforms, and despite this fact, the app appears to lack the types of fun and quirky Easter eggs that you might come to expect from an app of this caliber.

That’s where a newly released and free jailbreak tweak called AngryDuolingo by iOS developer Idefix2020 comes into play. It makes using the Duolingo app more fun by giving the Home Screen icon some added character as the app accumulates more and more missed notifications.