Music

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

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.

Groovify lets you customize the Spotify Music app without boundaries

Although Apple pushes its Apple Music streaming service on its consumer base, I still find myself preferring Spotify, especially now that the service bundles Hulu with its Spotify Premium subscription. That said, I don’t see myself switching to Apple Music any time soon, and it excites me when I happen upon a new Spotify-centric jailbreak tweak.

The latest of such releases is Groovify by iOS developer Revulate, which brings all sorts of color customization options and a whole lot more to the official Spotify app for iOS. You can see a few examples of the tweak’s aftermath in the screenshots above.

Prevent Now Playing apps from being killed via the App Switcher with DontKillMyMusic

Do you ever launch your App Switcher and start swiping away at apps until there’s nothing left? Despite how unnecessary people claim this to be, it’s common practice for folks to habitually clear apps when not in use. But the real problem manifests itself when you accidentally kill an app that’s playing music in the background. Yeah… frowny pants.

A new free jailbreak tweak called DontKillMyMusic by iOS developer Karimo299 aims to prevent this dilemma by empowering users with the ability to designate which apps can and can’t be killed via the App Switcher.