How to Customize Your Jailbroken Lockscreen

Ok, so you’ve jailbroken your iPhone. Now what?

Well the first thing you can do is change that boring old, vanilla, lock screen. The default iOS lock screen doesn’t do much other than telling you the time and date. With a jailbroken iPhone the possibilities are endless. You could have it display the weather and maybe even show what new emails you have received. On top of all this, you can make it in any style you want as you can choose from the wide array of possibilities that are out there.

For this tutorial, I will be using a nice, clean, and easy to customize lock screen that has the ability to display the time (of course), date, and local weather in a simple and elegant manner. Once you’re through, yours should like the one displayed above however, with accessibility of jailbreaking, you can easily customized however you wish.

Things You Will Need

Before you begin, you will first need a couple of things. First of all, you will need some sort of iPhone file explorer. This will allow you to browse the files within your iPhone via your computer, Mac and PC. You will need this so you can insert the theme files into your iPhone. I recommend you use iPhone Explorer (I appreciate the self-explanatory name) as it is 100% free and seems to be the most popular. You will also need to install “Lockscreen Clock Hide”, “Winterboard”, and “CleanStatus” from Cydia.

Step 1

Download the theme that corresponds to your iOS version number. Click here if you are running iOS version 4.1 or below. Or click here if you are running iOS 4.2.1.

Step 2

Once you have downloaded the correct theme, unzip it and find “LockBackground.html”. Open it up with a plain text editor (Notepad for Windows or TextEdit for OSX) and look for “var locale: Los Angeles, California” and replace “Los Angles, California” with your own location. This will allow the weather widget to give you the weather for your local area.

Step 3

Use your iPhone file explorer, in this case iPhone Explorer, and find click on “Root”, “Library” and then “Themes”

Step 4

Copy the folder within the zip file called “iOS 4.2.1 – Custom LS” to the “Themes” folder within your iPhone.

Step 5

Now go to your iPhone, open up Settings and scroll down to the “Clock Hide” section. Once in, enable it and it will now hide the default time and date on the lock screen.

Step 6

Now go back to Settings and click on “CleanStatus”. CleanStatus is an easy way to manage what is displayed on your status bar, the bar that displays your signal strength, time, battery life and other miscellaneous stuff. The program allows you to hide which ever icons you do not want to be shown. Enable CleanStatus, and for now, switch “Carrier Name” to on. This will disable AT&T for example, from being shown on the status bar.

Step 7

Click on the Winterboard App (it will be located either in your Settings menu or on your springboard) and go to “Select Themes”. Click on “iOS 4.2.1 – Custom LS”

Step 8

Click back to Winterboard and hit the "Respring" button. This will basically do a quick a reboot of your iPhone's springboard, the place where all your apps are store. After respringing, the changes should of taken place. 

Congratulations! Your lock screen is now customized! If you want to change the lock screen background, simply overwrite “background.jpg” in the theme’s folder with any picture of your choice.