Jailbroken App of the Week: Activator

One of my favorite Jailbroken packages is Activator. What it is is an app that allows you change the functionality of all your iPhone buttons from the home button to volume switches in addition to add custom multi-touch gestures.


For example, say you want to quickly change the current song that is playing on your iPod. Let’s say your driving as well. The only way to do test on the default iPhone is by first unlocking your iPhone, possibly putting in your passcode, and somehow hitting the next song button, that is if you already had Music open. That is pretty dangerous seeing how you would be forced to taking your eyes of the road. And only just recently had Apple added the Voice Control functionality. Voice Control is fine and all but you still have to unlock your iPhone and hope that your iPhone manages to hear “Next Song” instead the other different commands. However with Activator you can configure your iPhone to go to the next song when you hit volume down, then volume up within three seconds. This way you can safely change song without taking your eyes of the road, a much safer alternative.

Setting up an Activator event is super easy too. Once you have it installed, you will be brought to menu that will have the option “Anywhere”. If you want created an event that will be activated at any time including at the home screen, in an app, and at the lock screen, click on that. You can also create an event that will be limited to either, at the homescreen, in an application, or a lock screen. This can helpful if you only want to be change song with the volume switch only in an application but not while you are adjusting the volume from inside your pocket. From there you will be brought to list of buttons and available events to activate a variety of actions. For the sake of demonstrating, we will use my next song via volume switch idea. Scroll down the event list until you find “Down, Up” and click on that. There you will be able to choose a selection of actions including for this case “Next Song”. To finish the process all you need to click on that then you are done. You successfully create your first Activator action!


Another cool feature is Menus. The recently added function lets you have a menu pop up over whatever you were doing on your iPhone and will give you variety options that you can customize yourself. For example you set a menu to be activated when you triple tap the home button, and it can give you the option to either quit all apps, lock the device, pull up the multitasking dock, toggle airplane mode, toggle Wi-Fi, and more.


Probably the coolest part of Activator is that since it is pretty popular in the jailbreaking community, there are a lot of neat add-ons that tie with other packages. Just to name a few, Activator can be used with Music Controls Pro, iRealSMS, SBSettings, Backgrounder, and many more. In addition there are extra actions you can download such as brightness activator allows you to change the brightness by setting two different events, one for up the other for down. Another cool bonus action is AppQuit Activator which lets you set an event that will close the app that is in focus, which comes in handy when you don't feel like closing the app, opening the multitasking dock, and quit it from there. You can also create an event to kill all running apps, which is nice if things are starting to run slow on your iPhone. Best of all, add-ons for Activator come out pretty often, making an already extremely useful app even better.