How to Make Your iPhone Look Like iOS 7 Right Now


iOS 7 comes with a pretty sleek new look, but you need to be a developer to actually check it out before this fall. Thankfully, you can get the look and feel of iOS 7 really easily with a few jailbreak tweaks and themes. Here's what you'll need.

We talked before about getting the best features of iOS 7, but that didn't really cover a lot of the new look. iOS 7 sports adramatically different look than previous versions. Everything from the homescreen to the Notification Center is completely different looking. We're not going to be able to create an exact replica on iOS 6, but we can get it pretty close. Other than ajailbroken phone, here's what you'll need to do it.

Get the iOS 7 Home Screen

How to Make Your iPhone Look Like iOS 7 Right Now

First things first, let's skin the icons and home screen to get the right look. For that, you'll need Winterboard (check out our guide to customizing your iPhone with Winterboard if you need some help with the basics) so you can install themes.

The theme we're going to use is the iOS 7 Theme by pw5a29. This includes: app icons, the settings interface, messages, signal bars, the lockscreen, and more. Once it's downloaded, go into Winterboard and enable: iOS 7 StatusBar, Springboard, Siri, Notification Center, Messages UI, Lockscreen, Icons & UI, and Folders. This gets you really close to the look of iOS 7, but we also need to update the font. iOS 7 slightly changed the font throughout the operating system, so,download and install this iOS 7 font. Once it's downloaded, open BytaFont, and select iOS 7. When your phone reboots, you'll have a new system-wide font that better reflects iOS 7.

The above gets your home screen looking pretty close to iOS 7. It's not perfect, and once you open any of the stock apps the illusion is broken, but if you're only concerned about the home screen this does the trick.

Add the Parallax Effect

Surprisingly, the Parallax effect where it looks like a 3D effect is on your home screen has been around for a while for jailbroken iPhones. You just need to download and install the DeepEnd tweak from Ryan Petrich's repository in Cydia. Once it's installed, your background moves with your phone's accelerometer.

Add the Control Center Toggles to Notification Center

How to Make Your iPhone Look Like iOS 7 Right Now

The new version of Notification Center is a pretty pretty big overhaul that nobody's replicated quite yet. That said, you can combine a few tweaks together to make the Notification Center in iOS 6 look like a combination of the Notification Center and Control Center in iOS 7:

  1. Download and install NCSettingsfrom Cydia.
  2. Enable NCSettings by turning it on in Settings > Notifications.
  3. Download and installBlurriedNCBackground from Cydia.
  4. Grab the iOS 7 Control Togglestheme for Winterboard. Enable it in both Winterboard (iOS 7 Control Toggles BG) and NC Settings (Settings > NC Settings > Theme > iOS 7 Control Toggles).
  5. If you want to add the Control Center-style music controls, you can add in NCMusicGestures. It's not as good looking as the iOS 7 music controls, but it's functionally the same.

That's it, now your Notification Center works almost identically to Control Center in iOS 7.

Add a Few Minor Tweaks

If you want to extend the look a little more, you can with a few additional themes and tweaks:

It's not a perfect replica, but it's pretty close in appearance if not the function. The best part is you can do all this and retain your jailbreak. So, if you're hesitant to make that upgrade to iOS 7 in the fall, you can get the look of it right now without worrying about the jailbreak down the line.

And hey, if Android users want in on the fun, you can do the same thing yourself.5 discussions displayed because an author is participating or following a participant.