As with every major iOS & iPadOS release, there’s usually some overlap with new features that Apple announces and some pre-existing functionality that jailbreakers have had on this platform for years (or even as much as a decade) thanks to jailbreak tweaks. The same can even be said about Apple’s upcoming iOS & iPadOS 26 updates, which the Cuperinto-based company announced at WWDC 2025.
Curious as to what features iOS & iPadOS 26 bring to their respective platforms that jailbreakers have had forever? Well, you’re certainly in the right place. We’ve been reviewing jailbreak tweaks for more than a decade, which positions us in just the right place to point some fingers. Follow along as we highlight just a few examples.
1) Liquid Glass
Apple announced an all-new aesthetic for its various platforms that it calls Liquid Glass – it’s a transparent UI, including the Home Screen’s app icons, that helps you see more of what’s happening in the background without things like app icons, tab bars, and buttons getting in the way of that.
It’s worth noting that the Glasklart theme has been around for well over a decade and attempted to make this possible for the device’s Home Screen app icons. It was once one of the most popular themes ever created for jailbroken iPhones, and Liquid Glass certainly looks a lot like it, despite encompassing more than just the Home Screen as Glasklart did in its prime.
2) Battery Charging ETA
iOS 26 will display a time estimate indicating how long it’ll be before your iPhone’s battery fully charges when connected to a power source.
There have been several jailbreak tweaks in the past decade that have tried to perfect this particularly challenging feat, including Predix and Remaining Charge Time.
3) Messages App Backgrounds
Apple is allowing iMessage users to configure custom backgrounds in their chats for the first time starting with iOS 26, and both the sender and the recipient are able to see and change this background for a more personalized chat experience.
While it’s a much-needed feature, it’s worth noting that the jailbreak community has been doing this for years. Just consider a jailbreak tweak like ChatWall, for example, which allowed users to configure a custom background in their Messages app.
4) Siri on the Home Screen
iOS 26 puts a dedicated Siri app on your Home Screen, making it easier to launch the voice assistant and get help with things in a hands-free fashion.
It’s worth noting that there has been a jailbreak tweak called SiriApp for quite a long time that did exactly this on pwned handsets.
5) Adaptive Power Mode
Apple is adding a new feature to its battery settings in iOS 26 called Adaptive Power, which can make small performance adjustments to extend your battery life such as lowering display brightness or throttling CPU performance without going to such extremes as what Low Power Mode does.
Jailbreakers have long had access to battery management techniques similar to these with jailbreak tweaks like the ever-popular SmartBattery add-on, which has been iterative update releases with each major release of iOS for the past several years.
6) Windowed Multitasking on iPad
Craig Federighi almost couldn’t keep a straight face when announcing this one, but iPadOS 26 will finally bring one of the most highly requested features to the iPad: the ability to use apps as individual windows on your display rather than in full-screen or side-by-side modes.
But let’s not fool ourselves here – this is a feature that jailbreakers have been enjoying for years thanks to jailbreak tweaks like MilkyWay 4, which allow apps to run as individual windows on iPads just like the native feature coming to iPadOS 26.
7) Auto-Hiding Home Bar
iOS & PadOS 26 appear to automatically hide the Home Bar when it’s not being used to reduce user interface distractions while inside of apps.
Notably, this is something that has been available to jailbreakers for quite a long time thanks to jailbreak tweaks like AutoHideHomeBarX.
8) Custom Alarm Snooze Times
Apple is adding a lot more flexibility to alarms in iOS & iPadOS 26, with one of the most mainstream updates being the ability to customize your alarm’s snooze time to a duration for your choosing.
This is, again, a feature that has been available for several years thanks to jailbreaking and tweaks such as Snooze++, so it once again seems like this may be a borrowed feature.
9) Stage Manager on Older iPads
Along with windowed multitasking on iPadOS 26, Apple also appears to have unlocked Stage Manager capabilities on all models that can run iPadOS 26 – even older iPads that didn’t support it originally.
Stage Manager, while a native feature, has long since been able to be backported using jailbreak tweaks like EnableStageManager to use this feature on unsupported older iPads.
10) Improved Files App
iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have each made serious improvements to the mobile Files app on iPhones and iPads, making it into a much more feasible file manager where users can find, interact with, and launch files directly from their mobile devices.
While the Files app has been around for quite some time, even in its limited capacity, users who’ve wanted a more powerful file manager app have long been able to take advantage of jailbreak apps like iFile and Filza to accomplish this task, completely side-stepping the Files app previously.
11) Translation in Messages
iOS & iPadOS 26 will introduce a feature called Live Translation in apps like Messages, FaceTime, and Phone so that you can better communicate with people who don’t speak the same primary language as you do.
While live translation isn’t quite something specific to the jailbreak community, developers did come very close to offering global translation features with jailbreak tweaks like Translomatic, which can make it really easy to translate text in virtually any app, including those supported by Live Translation.
12) Fully Unified Phone App UI
iOS 26 is redesigning the Phone app so that you have what Apple calls a ‘fully unified’ app experience rather than several tabs that you need to move through.
This is a concept that originally made its way into the hands of jailbreakers just a few years ago by way of a jailbreak tweak called Novus, and it seems that the idea has caught on with Apple’s software engineering team.
13) Updated Camera UI
iOS & iPadOS 26 are completely re-imagining the Camera app’s user interface to make it simpler and easier to access your favorite features. This means removing a lot of unnecessary buttons and moving controls to a more unified area in the app.
Making changes to the Camera app user interface has been a popular pastime of jailbreakers for years. Tweaks like CameraModes and iPad Cam have already tried to make this a reality in the past, simplifying the Camera app’s usability and condensing features so that the interface doesn’t feel as confusing at first glance.
14) Full-Screen Animated Album Artwork
Apple showed off a really cool full-screen animated album artwork for Now Playing tracks in iOS 26, especially when being played from Apple Music.
It’s worth noting that there have been lots of jailbreak tweak releases over the years that have ported such features over to pwned devices. Examples include CanvasSync, which could use the Spotify app’s animated Canvas feature as your device’s temporary wallpaper.
15) Floating Tab Bar
iOS 26 makes better use of the limited screen real estate and complements the rounded edges of modern iPhone displays by removing the typical tab bar at the bottom of certain app interfaces and replacing it with a floating button bar that lets you see more of the in-app content that matters most to you.
A floating tab bar has been around in the jailbreak community for quite some time, making its appearance in the form of jailbreak tweaks such as Fiona, for example.
16) CarPlay Video Playback
For the first time starting with iOS 26, CarPlay users will be able to play videos from their CarPlay unit while the vehicle is in Park.
Jailbreakers have been doing this for a very long time, thanks to jailbreak tweaks like CarPlayEnable.
17) AirPods Low Battery Notifications
Getting a subtle notification when your AirPods get low on battery is a feature new to iOS & iPadOS 26.
But if you’ve been jailbreaking your devices for a while, then you might be familiar with a jailbreak tweak called AirPods Case Low Battery.
18) More Podcast Playback Speeds
iOS & iPadOS 26 are adding a new feature to the native Podcasts app that lets users pick from more playback speed options. These can help you listen faster to something in a shorter period of time so that you can finish your podcast on your commute to work rather than playing at 1x and only getting 80% of the way through.
While the iOS jailbreak community has never made something like this for the Podcasts app directly, it’s worth noting that jailbreak tweaks have previously added more playback speed settings to apps like YouTube via the YouSpeed tweak to augment the existing playback speed options, so the idea has definitely circulated in the jailbreak community well before iOS & iPadOS 26.
19) Upgrades to Screenshots
iOS & iPadOS 26 bring an upgraded screenshot interface to their respective platforms, making it easier to edit and save screenshots that you can after pressing the buttons on the side of your device to capture one.
The jailbreak community has been making use of jailbreak tweaks like Snapper 3 to enhance the screenshot user experience for years, so while we applaud Apple for making these small changes, we need to emphasize that jailbreakers had these upgrades first.
20) New Look for Toggle Switches
iOS & iPadOS 26 bring an updated aesthetic to the toggle switches that you find throughout the operating system, such as in the Settings app when turning features on or off.
For jailbreakers, seeing a new look and feel for toggle switches is nothing new. In fact, they’ve been making jailbreak tweaks like Switches that have enabled custom toggle switches all along.
21) Per-app Battery Consumption Alerts
New to iOS 26 is the ability to receive notifications when an app is using more battery than usual, or when a certain app is using more battery than other apps on your device. It’s a feature intended to make users more aware of apps that are heavier on resources.
It’s worth noting that jailbreak tweaks like Dra1n have been doing this for jailbreakers for a long time. While the tweak mostly reported which jailbreak tweaks, not apps, were using the most battery life, the concept remains largely the same, making it a popular option in the community.
22) Background Sounds
Apple is upgrading iOS & iPadOS 26 with new background sounds that can help drown out disturbing sounds around you and help you concentrate or sleep.
This idea previously made waves as a jailbreak tweak called Grosou, and it offered a lot of the same sounds that the new native background sounds will, such as rain.
23) Reminders in Control Center
You can now enable a new Control Center-based Reminders toggle in iOS & iPadOS 26, which lets you save a reminder right from Control Center without having to find the icon on your potentially cluttered Home Screen.
But this was already possible with jailbreak tweaks that could add additional toggles and shortcuts to the Control Center on older versions of iOS, such as Coeus. While it wasn’t as streamlined, or purpose-built for Reminders, the same result could be achieved.
24) Create Custom Ringtones
You can now use any audio file in your device’s Files app to create and import a custom ringtone directly from your device and without a computer running GarageBand starting with iOS & iPadOS 26.
It’s worth noting that there have been jailbreak tweaks that have made this possible for well over a decade, such as AnyRing. It’s almost laughable that it took Apple this long to implement this!
25) Change Size of Lock Screen Clock
iOS 26 will allow iPhone users to re-size the Lock Screen’s clock for the first time. By entering the Lock Screen’s editing interface, it will be possible to drag a slider to make the Lock Screen clock’s text larger or smaller.
But re-sizing the Lock Screen’s clock text is nothing new to jailbreakers, who’ve been doing this for several years thanks to the availability of different jailbreak tweaks such as miniTime.
26) Different Control Center Background Blur
It appears that iOS 26 takes a less aggressive approach to the Control Center UI’s background blur, especially when using the Liquid Glass mode that Apple touts as its major operating system redesign for 2025.
While it’s interesting to see the new aesthetic, it’s worth noting that jailbreakers have been able to modify or even eliminate the Control Center background and blur with tweaks like CCBG.
Wrapping up
While it’s incredibly unlikely that Apple has been studying the realm of jailbreak tweaks and simply plucking them off our tree to grow in their own garden, it’s still interesting to see just how many of iOS & iPadOS 26’s new features have already been accessible to jailbreakers in the form of jailbreak tweaks for years.
While many of these features are simply logical outgrowths from Apple’s operating system before the update, it’s still worth noting that jailbreak community members have brought these features to Apple’s devices with no help from Apple, indicating that many of these features are in high demand, while others offer unique appearances that users desire.
