iOS 11 is packed with tons of amazing new features and major improvements, ranging from a redesigned Control Center and App Store to an all-new native screen recorder. While these new features and changes are exciting, some of them have been available to jailbreak users for a long time.
iOS 11 Features Apple Copied From Jailbreak Apps
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 iOS 11 features that were copied or inspired by jailbreak apps.
1. Screen Recording
Screen recording is a feature that many iOS users have been requesting for a long time. Apple finally added this capability to iOS 11 by introducing a native screen recorder that can be toggled from Control Center.
For jailbreak users, screen recording has been around for a long time. CCRecord, for instance, adds a button to Control Center to quickly toggle screen recording on and off, whereas Display Recorder by Ryan Petrich is a more feature-rich screen recording tweak for iOS.
2. Customizable Control Center
Control Center has received a complete redesign in iOS 11. One of the interesting features of the new Control Center is that you can customize it to add or remove controls. While this is a new feature for stock iOS users, it’s nothing new for jailbreak users.
Tweaks such as CCHide, Polus, and Onizuka allow you to customize Control Center and add new features to it. For instance, FlipControlCenter is a jailbreak tweak that lets you add or remove toggles from Control Center.
3. Move Multiple Apps at Once
One of the frustrating things about iOS is that you can move only one app at a time. This can be quite a task when it comes to repositioning more than a bunch of apps on the Home screen. iOS 11 solves this problem by allowing you to move multiple apps at once.
Once again, this feature has been inspired by a jailbreak tweak known as MultiIconMover+ that allows you to do the same thing, plus it offers way more features, such as moving a group of apps into or out of a folder.
4. Smart Invert
While iOS 11 adds a ‘Smart Invert’ feature that kind of works like Dark Mode, this feature is already available to jailbreak users in the form of a tweak known as Eclipse, or Noctis. These tweaks work much better than Smart Invert and have been made originally to mimic Dark Mode, as opposed to iOS 11’s Smart Invert feature which is an accessibility feature that doesn’t work well in some apps such as Instagram.
5. More Icons on iPad Dock
You can now add more icons to your iPad dock, thanks to iOS 11. If you’ve ever jailbroken, you’ll know that this feature was greatly inspired by a tweak known as Harbor that brings a macOS-inspired dock to iOS and works with iPhone as well.
6. One-Handed Keyboard
The new iPhones have a larger display, which can make it difficult to use with a single hand, especially when you want to type. Apple has a solution for this in iOS 11 by introducing a one-handed keyboard mode, where the keys shift a little closer to each other and move to the left or right side of the screen.
This is another feature that was taken from the jailbreak community. OneHanded is a tweak that works quite similar, except that it adds new buttons to the extra space that is created when one-handed keyboard mode is enabled.
7. View Animated GIFs in Photos App
Thanks to the popular trend of GIFs, iOS 11 now has the capability to display animated GIFs in the Photos app, instead of showing it as a still frame. This is nothing exciting for jailbreak users as a tweak known as GIFViewer brought this capability a long time back to jailbroken iOS devices.
8. QR Code Scanning
One of the essential features that iOS lacked was a QR code scanner, and this was made possible via third-party apps. However, with iOS 11, you no longer need a third-party app as the stock Camera app has the capability to scan QR codes.
For what it’s worth, a jailbreak tweak known as NativeQR added this feature to the Camera app long before Apple did.
9. A Less Obtrusive Volume HUD
For a long time, the most annoying feature of iOS has been the intrusive volume HUD, which blocks a large portion of the screen and appears right in the center. iOS 11 solves this annoyance by displaying a subtle and less obtrusive volume HUD when watching full-screen videos.
Again, the jailbreak community solved this problem a long time back. Tweaks such as Sonus, StatusHUD, and YoutubeVolume display an unobtrusive volume HUD that appears right in Status bar.
10. File Manager
iOS 11 introduces a new app called Files that serves as a file manager app, except that it’s not as good as a jailbreak tweak known as Filza, or iFile. These tweaks offer more features and provide access to the system files.
These are the 10 features of iOS 11 that have been inspired by the jailbreak community. As I mentioned earlier, this is not surprising, every year Apple adds new features that have been inspired by jailbreak apps and tweaks.
- 13 iOS 10 Features Inspired by Jailbreak Tweaks
- Take a look at the 7 jailbreak inspired iOS 9 features
- 6 iOS 8 features inspired by Jailbreak Apps and Tweaks
- Nine iOS 7 features inspired by jailbreak tweaks
- 5 iOS 5 Features Inspired By Jailbreak Apps / Tweaks
Watch Cody’s iOS 11 Jailbreak Tweaks video to see them in action:
We can’t wait to see how jailbreak app developers will extend the functionality of iOS 11 when the iOS 11 jailbreak is released.
To learn more about iOS 11, read these articles:
- 50 Awesome iOS 11 Features and Changes
- Top 25 Hidden iOS 11 Features
- The 10 Best iOS 11 Features for iPhone
- The 10 Best iOS 11 Features for iPad
- iOS 11 vs iOS 10: A Look at the UI Design Changes in iOS 11
With these new jailbreak inspired features in iOS 11, do you still plan to jailbreak your device after upgrading to iOS 11? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
