Enable System Wide Facebook Chat Heads on iOS 7 with MessageBox

BY Jason

Published 30 Mar 2014

Last year, Facebook released a really useful feature on iOS and Android called Chat Heads that allowed you to chat with your friends while you were browsing your Facebook feed. There is one key difference between the implementation of Chat Heads on the two OSes — Chat Heads on Android are system wide, whereas on iOS, they’re confined to the Facebook, and Paper app.

Hacker Adam Bell released a jailbreak tweak called MessageBox last year to bring the two Chat Head implementations to parity. He extracted the Chat Head code from Facebook’s app and let it run system wide.

With iOS 7, however, MessageBox broke, but Bell released v2.0 a few days ago, with support for iOS 7. To install MessageBox on your iPhone, you’ll need to have Facebook Paper installed (non-US instructions). You can then search for MessageBox in Cydia, under the BigBoss repo.

messagebox

Once you’ve installed it, simply open the Facebook Paper app, wait for it to load and then press the Home Button. You should see the circular Chat Heads on your home screen.

If you regularly chat on Facebook, then MessageBox is a really great tool to respond to messages without completely switching from your current context. Tell us what you think about the iOS 7 version of MessageBox in the comments below.