The iPhone 5s fingerprint scanner, aka Touch ID, is a handy little feature that lets you unlock your phone with just a touch of your finger. Unfortunately, that’s about all it does. Fortunately, you can make it more useful with these jailbreak tweaks.
Picture: LongQuattro
You’ll need a jailbroken iPhone 5s to make use of these tweaks. Make sure your fingerprints are scanned properly before you start playing around with these tweaks.
UnlockID Unlocks Your Mac and Fills in Passwords from Your Phone
UnlockID ($2.99) is one of the more interesting uses of Touch ID that we’ve seen so far. It allows you to unlock your Mac on your phone and insert passwords using your fingerprint. You’ll start by downloading UnlockID on your phone and then downloading the companion app on your Mac. From there, you’ll pair the two over Bluetooth and use your phone to unlock your Mac. You can add usernames and passwords to the Mac app and use it to autofill passwords on websites when you touch your finger to your phone’s scanner. It’s probably not as secure as a password manager like Lastpass, but it is a lot more fun to use.
BioProtect Locks Individual Apps with Your Fingerprint
BioProtect ($2.99) locks your apps, folders and settings panes so they’re not accessible unless you scan your fingerprint. When you first launch BioProtect, you can go in and lock down your apps. To open one of those apps, you’ll need to scan your fingerprint. This is handy when you want to lock specific apps but don’t want to lock your phone completely.
Do Whatever You Want with Activator
Activator (free) has long been one of the most useful tweaks for iOS because it allows you to assign just about any action to a button press on your phone. Activator recently updated to work with the TouchID sensor, which means you can assign a touch of the sensor to any of the actions in Activator. That means you can set a TouchID scan to pause your music or launch an app.
Touchy Launches Individual Apps Based on Fingerprints
Touchy (free) takes the opposite approach of BioProtect and allows you to launch apps with a fingerprint. What makes Touchy handy is that you can link one app to each fingerprint. For example, you can launch Twitter with your thumb and Chrome with your index finger. It’s a surprisingly handy and useful little tweak for those apps you launch a lot.
Virtual Home Simulates a Home Button Press
Virtual Home (free) basically gives your home button a rest by allowing you to just tap the Touch ID instead of pressing the button. So, a single touch of the sensor brings you back to the home screen and a tap and hold pulls up the multitasking menu. It’s simple, but it saves you a lot of wear on one of your iPhone’s most used buttons.
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