When Apple began doing away with the traditionalHome Buttonstarting with the iconic iPhone X in 2017, it became instantaneously evident that users would need an alternative means of getting to the Home Screen. It was from this realization that the software-basedHome Barwas conceived.
Most have adapted or even gracefully accepted the new Home Bar standard, but for the jailbreak community, is has become something of a customizable element. For those looking to put the Home Bar on a diet, a newly released and freejailbreak tweakcalledhomepillby iOS developerzacshrinks the stock Home Bar down to a pill-shaped object that appears less intrusive to the eyes when hovering over an app’s interface.
The screenshot examples above depict the before and after differences between the stock-sized Home Bar and the new smaller pill-shaped Home Bar. Both Home Bars behave and work exactly the same as one another, but one just leaves a smaller aesthetic footprint for the sake of staying out of your way. You’ll also notice that the smaller homepill doesn’t incorporate the “Swipe up to open” text.
What we like about the homepill tweak is that the smaller Home Bar footprint only consumes about as much screen real estate as the amount of space that your fingertip would ever take up on your touch screen at any given time. The stock Home Bar size is somewhat overstated, if not unnecessary, and homepill is a classic remedy to this rather subtle inconsistency.
The homepill tweak doesn’t come with any options to configure, and that’s to be expected since the tweak is only intended for a single purpose. Once installed, it transforms the Home Bar to look as it does in the After screenshot above. Rather than disabling the tweak via Settings, you would instead uninstall homepill to get the stock-sized Home Bar back.
If you’re interested in trying homepill, then you canacquire it for free from the Luminant Repo repositoryvia your preferred package manager. The tweak supportsjailbrokeniOS 12 and 13 devices.
If you’re not already using the Luminant Repo repository, then you’re able to add it to your package manager of choice with the following URL:
For some other interesting ways to trick out your iPhone’s Home Bar, we recommend looking atAutoHideHomeBarXto automatically hide the Home Bar when it isn’t in use andHomeBarMediaProgressto transform the Home Bar into a Now Playing media progress indicator.
Do you plan to put your Home Bar on a diet, or are you happy with the stock dimensions? Let us know in the comments section below.
