After several months of rumors and speculations, Apple unveiled iOS 7, the next generation mobile operating system for iPhone and iPad at the WWDC 2013 Keynote on Monday.
Every year Apple adds new features that have been inspired by jailbreak apps and tweaks, and this year hasn’t been any different. We take a look at the jailbreak inspired features Apple has included in iOS 7.
1. Quick Settings
iOS 7 comes with a new feature called Control Center that can be accessed anywhere in the iOS by swiping up at the bottom. Control Center includes some frequently used system toggles such as AirPlane mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb and Orientation Lock. It similar to the popular SBSettings jailbreak tweak. Since Control Center can be accessed from anywhere, it allows users to enable or disable the toggles without going through the hassle of exiting an app, if you’re in one, launching the Settings app, navigating to the setting and then enabling or disabling it.
When you tap on the Settings toggles, iOS informs you if the toggle is enabled or disabled with a subtle message and also highlights or greys out the toggle like the NCSettings tweak. Unfortunately, Apple has included only 5 toggles and there is not way to configure the toggle based on your preference, which is possible with NCSettings.
2. Improved App Switcher
Apple has finally improved the app switcher in iOS 7, which makes better use of the screen real estate. In iOS 7, when you press the Home button twice, it displays card-like screen previews (along with the logo of the app below it) of the apps you have open. You can swipe up on a card to quit the app. Apple has moved the music playback controls, brightness control and the orientation lock toggle to the Control Center.
The implementation of the app switcher is similar to Dash, an app switcher jailbreak tweak. In fact, the implementation is closer to this iOS 7 concept.
3. Parallax Effect
One of the coolest features of iOS 7 is the parallax effect that moves shadows and lighting effects on the home screen as the user moves the phone in his or her hand. It creates a pretty awesome 3D parallax effect.
Jailbreak tweaks such as DeepEnd and 3DBoard brought the 3D effect to the home screen back in 2011.
4. Live Clock
The clock icon now displays the correct time, including the live second hand, which is exactly how it works when you install the Live Clock jailbreak tweak.
5. Dynamic Wallpaper
iOS 7 comes with two dynamic wallpapers images, which have subtle animated bubble shapes floating in the background. Jailbreak tweaks like LivePapers have brought animated wallpapers to jailbroken iOS devices.
6. Panoramic Wallpaper
Jailbreak tweaks like LiveWallpaper allow you to set panoramic images as your wallpaper, which are scrollable when you flip through home screen pages.
Apple has added the feature in iOS 7. In addition to the dynamic wallpaper feature, iOS 7 also allows you to set panoramic images as wallpapers, so you can pan around the image by simply tilting your iOS device.
7. Blacklist
You will finally be able to block phone calls, messages or FaceTime from specific numbers in iOS 7, which was previously possible only using jailbreak tweak iBlacklist.
8. Folders
iOS 7 will finally allow you to add unlimited number of apps to a folder, which has been possible using jailbreak tweaks such as InfiniFolders and FolderEnhancer.
When you tap on the folder, it displays 9 apps in the folder, and you can swipe from left to right to go to the next folder page like the home screen pages.
9. Notification Center
The iOS 7 Notification Centre has a nice translucent background instead of the grey linen background. It seems to be inspired by the BlurriedNCBackground and FastBlurredNotificationCenter jailbreak tweaks, which blurs the Notification Center background.
Other minor features:
- Ability to access Notification Center from the Lock screen. Jailbreak tweak such as Bulletin, Springtomize allow you access Notification Center from the lock screen in iOS 6.x.
- In iOS 7, Safari gets a unified bar for URLs and search, which Apple calls “smart search”. If you’ve jailbroken your device, you can install Safari Unibar to combine the address and the search bar.
These are some of the features we could think that seem to be inspired from jailbreak apps and tweaks, please let us know if we’ve missed any anything. This also means that when Apple releases iOS 7 to the public later this fall, there will be fewer reasons to jailbreak your iOS device.
Do you plan to jailbreak your device after upgrading to iOS 7? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
