An iOS 10 lock screen showing the time and a wave wallpaper. Photo: Wallpaper: Shalom Jacobovitz Screenshot: TheMostAmazingTechnik, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
One of the quiet stories of the iPhone is how much of the jailbreak scene ended up inside iOS. Apple never says it copied a tweak, and good ideas often appear in several places at once. But the pattern is hard to miss. Here are the clearest examples.
The big ones
| Jailbreak-era idea | Popular tweaks | Official iOS feature | Arrived |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pull-down notification list | MobileNotifier, LockInfo | Notification Center | iOS 5 (2011) |
| Quick toggles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, brightness | SBSettings, NCSettings | Control Center | iOS 7 (2013) |
| Reply to messages without leaving an app | biteSMS quick reply | Interactive notifications | iOS 8 (2014) |
| Third-party keyboards | Various keyboard tweaks | Custom keyboards | iOS 8 (2014) |
| Home screen widgets | Dashboard X, Intelliscreen | Home screen widgets | iOS 14 (2020) |
| Choosing default apps | Sparrow Plus, Browser Changer | Default mail and browser | iOS 14 (2020) |
| System-wide dark theme | Eclipse, Noctis | Dark Mode | iOS 13 (2019) |
| Customised lock screens | Themes, LockHTML | Lock Screen customisation | iOS 16 (2022) |
| Icons anywhere, recoloured icons | WinterBoard, SnowBoard, Iconoclasm | Free placement and tinted icons | iOS 18 (2024) |
| Custom toggles in the control panel | CCSettings, FlipControlCenter | Customisable Control Center | iOS 18 (2024) |
The clearest link is Notification Center. Peter Hajas, the developer of the MobileNotifier tweak, joined Apple in 2011, and iOS 5 shipped a notification system that solved the same problem.
Smaller ones people forget
- Swipe to delete in more places and swipe-back gestures, long a staple of gesture tweaks such as Zephyr.
- Battery percentage in the status bar, removed from the larger notched models for a while and brought back in iOS 16.
- Back Tap (iOS 14) and the Action button, which echo the gesture launchers of Activator.
- Low Power Mode (iOS 9), which did officially what battery tweaks tried to do by switching off background tasks.
What still has no official version
Full theming of system fonts, deep changes to how the springboard behaves and installing apps from anywhere outside the European Union remain off the table. In the EU, the Digital Markets Act led Apple to allow alternative app marketplaces from iOS 17.4 in 2024, under its own notarisation rules.
A note on entertainment apps
Some old tweaks were all about games: controllers, emulators and, for a small crowd, unofficial poker and casino apps that the App Store would not carry at the time. Today the App Store allows real-money casino and betting apps where they are licensed and geo-restricted, as we explain in casino apps and the App Store rules. The jailbreak route for that kind of app has effectively disappeared.