Whenever you use your iPhone, the two icons that you are most likely to notice on the Home Screen are that of the Clock and Calendar apps. These apps are more than just visual display and show you both live date and live time. We don’t know why Apple doesn’t animate more of the Home Screen app icons as this would make the Home Screen aesthetically pleasing and will even result in the end users appreciating the time and effort that has been invested in making the Home Screen look presentable to them.
Well, it does seem highly unlikely that Apple will animate more of the native Home Screen app icons, especially since iOS 13 and 14 is focusing on the new widget platform. Thankfully, jailbreakers still have the ability to do what they want on their jailbroken device which includes incorporating eye-catching animations to the Home Screen icons. You can do this with the help of a newly released jailbreak tweak Gears that was created by iOS developer Chr1s.
With Gears, you can animate the Settings app icon using a rotating gear effect that will give you a déjà vu feeling if you have ever used iOS 7. If you have used it, then you might remember the OTA (over the air) animation that would update whenever you are trying to install a software update and this is the inspiration behind the tweak’s animation. After installing Gears, you get a dedicated preference pane in the Settings app from where you can enable or disable this tweak whenever you want.
There is a respring button also that is provided in the preference pane that you can use to save the changes after you turn on or off the tweak. Since it is a relatively lightweight tweak, you won’t notice any major impact on the battery of device after installing and using Gears. If you are looking for quirky ways to add motion to your device’s Home Screen then you can download Gears for free from the Packix repository. This tweak is currently supported on the jailbroken iOS and iPadOS 13 devices.
Are you interested in getting animated Home Screen icons like you would be provided in Gears? Do let us know your thoughts in the comment section. Moreover, if you would like to make the Activity app icon display into a real-time exercise ring progress, then try an older tweak named LiveRings.
