Home Bar

This tweak makes the Home Bar display your current battery level

Anthony Bouchard ∙ September 14, 2019

Many of Apple’s latest handsets lack a physical Home button, and instead rely on a software-based Home Bar for App Switcher activation, returning to the Home screen, and unlocking the device. Apart from these functionalities, however, the Home Bar itself is somewhat featureless.

If you’d like to give your iOS device’s Home Bar a welcomed helping of new functionality, then we’d recommend turning your attention to a newly released and free jailbreak tweak called BatteryHomeBar by iOS developer Braxton Anderson.

This tweak transforms the Home Bar into a Now Playing progress indicator

Anthony Bouchard ∙ May 19, 2019

All notched handsets, including the iPhone X, XR, XS, and XS Max, ditch the traditional Home Button in lieu of the new Home Bar, which is a software-centric ‘grabber’ that lives at the bottom of your display. The Home Bar is used to unlock your handset, return to the Home screen, and access the App Switcher, but that’s about it.

It seems like the Home Bar could be made to do so much more, and that's why we were particularly fascinated by the release of a new free jailbreak tweak called HomeBarMediaProgress by iOS developer Jordan Koch (eskimo_dev), as it aims to give the Home Bar an added purpose. More specifically, the tweak transforms the Home Bar into a status indicator for any Now Playing media that might be playing in the background.

XEdgeProtect prevents the iPhone X’s Home Bar from conflicting with apps and jailbreak tweaks

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated January 27, 2019

Starting with last year’s iPhone X, Apple nixed the Home Button from its entire lineup of smartphones and replaced it with the software-based Home Bar. The Home Bar resides at the bottom of your display, quietly waiting for upward swipe gestures for unlocking the handset or closing foregrounded apps.

The Home Bar compliments the iOS experience like bread and butter, and it also empowered Apple to achieve the signature edge-to-edge OLED display that many of us know and love, but it’s not without its quirks. Fortunately, a new free jailbreak tweak called XEdgeProtect by iOS developer smokin1337 addresses some of these issues.