Facebook brought its new Chat Heads feature to iPhone earlier this week, but it doesn’t offer quite the same experience as the Android version. The feature is designed to make your Facebook Messenger conversations easy to access from anywhere, but on iOS, it only works when you’re within the Facebook app — which kind of defeats its purpose.
But as is often the case, the jailbreaking community has a solution. A new tweak that allows you to use Chat Heads as Facebook originally intended on iPhone is coming soon to Cydia.
Created by 21-year-old Computer Science major Adam Bell, the new tweak will allow you to use Chat Heads anywhere on iPhone. Just like on Android, they’ll appear “on top” of iOS, no matter where you in the OS and no matter what app you’re in.
It took Bell just hours to create his tweak, which takes advantage of the Chat Heads layer inside the Facebook app. “The hardest part was getting this all to render on top of everything else,” Bell told The Verge, which requires Facebook to run continually in the background.
It shouldn’t take up too much battery life, however, because the feature isn’t very resource intensive, Bell says. “Only when you move the Chat Head is it actually doing anything.”
There are some kinks that need ironing out, however, so Bell’s tweak isn’t quite available just yet. There are some freezing issues, so these need fixing before the free tweak is made available in Cydia.
Source: The Verge
