iPhone X

The best screen protectors for iPhone

Need a new screen protector? You’ve come to the right place. Combining our years of personal experience and countless hours of research, we’ve put together a roundup of what we believe are the best iPhone screen protectors on the market.

Give your older iPhone a bevy of modern handset features with Little12

When Apple launched the iPhone X back in 2018, we knew the company was transitioning into a new hardware era. It wasn’t long before Apple ditched Home Button-equipped handsets altogether, paving the way for a more advanced gesture-driven user experience that could be enjoyed on a larger edge-to-edge display.

For those who still have an older Home Button-equipped iPhone, the user experience isn’t quite as robust as it would be on a notched handset by comparison. For that reason, iOS developer Ryan Nair launched Little12, a free jailbreak tweak that back-ports several of the gestures and features from notched devices (and then some) to non-notched devices.

This tweak automatically hides the Home Bar when it isn’t needed

Newer iPhone and iPad Pro models have ditched the traditional Home Button in favor of an edge-to-edge display that sports a software-based Home Bar instead. The Home Bar can be used for unlocking, returning to the Home Screen, toggling Reachability, and switching between apps, but many would argue that it doesn’t always need to be visible.

For those looking for a solution to this quandary, a new and free jailbreak tweak called AutoHideHomeBarX by iOS developer Asterix can automatically hide the Home Bar when it isn’t needed and cause it to reappear again when it is.

This tweak makes YouTube videos look nicer on notched iPhones

YouTube dark icon.

When watching videos in the YouTube app for iOS, those with notched handsets can view them one of two ways when the handset is in landscape orientation: 1) zoomed out such that the notch remains hidden in the video’s black side border; and 2) zoomed in such that the notch physically cuts into the video frame. Switching between these modes is as easy as using a pinch gesture while a video is playing.

As you might have noticed by now, some YouTube videos take better advantage of the wider display canvas, filling the display up to where the notch begins. This usually depends solely on the aspect ratio of the videographer’s filming equipment, but with the help of a new jailbreak tweak called UniZoom by iOS developer Lavie Gariv, users can synthetically impose similar scaling effects on virtually any video on YouTube.

Little11 augments older iPhones with modern gestures and features

Now that we live in a day and age in which notched, edge-to-edge displays are the norm for Apple-branded smartphones, those sporting traditional rectangular displays are beginning to show their age both in terms of appearance and functionality.

Despite the massive bummer this seems to entail at first glance, those who’ve taken the steps to jailbreak their aging iPhone can now call upon the help of a newly released and free jailbreak tweak called Little11 by iOS developer Ryan Nair to port many of the of the latest gestures and user interface elements that we’ve come to enjoy on the iPhone X and later to older handsets with traditional rectangular displays

Luca Todesco teases progress on checkra1n, a checkm8-based jailbreak

Just over a week ago, well-respected hacker and security researcher Luca Todesco took to Twitter to tease an all-new custom boot logo and frame buffer concept for checkra1n, a purported jailbreak utility that would be based on the recently-released checkm8 bootrom exploit from @axi0mX. Fortunately, the teasers haven’t stopped there.

Just this weekend, the official checkra1n Twitter page teased an image of what appears to be both a seventh-generation iPod touch and an iPhone SE – each running iOS 13 – with the checkra1n jailbreak app present on the Home screen.