One of the main selling points of iOS is its clean and simple look. Apple has invested a lot of time and effort in designing the beautiful and intuitive user interface. The design must be good because it has "inspired" other phone OS's to come up with a similar look.

But each person has different tastes. Users love to add their personal touch to everything they own. While iOS can be customized, some elements of the UI come with minimal customization options, one example being the iOS lockscreen. The only official personalization you can do to it is change the background image. Fortunately, there's a solution. If you have a jailbroken iOS device and you want to customize your lockscreen, there are countless ways to do it. This is one of them.

Let's Go Shopping

There are many reasons why people jailbreak their iOS device, but I guess the most popular one is to be able to change the look and feel. You can do this by activating Winterboard and applying a theme or two. There are lots of themes that you can find on Cydia, and choosing one among many is not an easy task. So I started my quest with the good old search engine.

I found that one of the good looking popular themes is LockMS. You can get the theme via Cydia. Just tap the search tab and type in the name. Tap LockMS from the result and tap the "Install" button on the top right corner of the screen.

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I took the screenshot after I installed LockMS, so the install button is replaced by "Modify".

As mentioned above, you'll need Winterboard to be able to run themes. You can download and install it independently, but the app should be installed automatically along with the first theme that you download. But the theme alone is not enough. To further customize your lockscreen, you need other applications from Cydia. The first one is "CleanStatus". This app will let you customize which screen information you want to display or hide.

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The next one on our shopping list is "Lockscreen Clock Hide". As the name suggests, this app will hide the big clock on the lockscreen so that it won't overlap with the clock from LockMS.

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And the last one of the pack is MiniSlider. This app will reduce the size of the lock slider so that the slider will not block LockMS.

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If you want to completely hide the lock slider, you can use one of these themes along LockMS: "Hide Slide to Unlock" or "No Slider". I don't use them because I feel more comfortable having the unlock slide on the lockscreen.

Let The Game Begin

With all the ingredients ready, we can start the customization process. Go to "Settings" and scroll down to the Winterboard.

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Then tap "Select Themes" to view the theme list.

custom ios

You can find all the installed themes here. Tap on the ones you want from the list. LockMS comes in several flavors. They are the basic version, the 24-hour version, the version with the "Tap To Unlock (TTU)" feature, and the one with invisible TTU. To enable our customization, choose one of the LockMS themes and MiniSlider.

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After choosing the theme, go back to the WinterBoard main screen and tap "Respring" to activate the theme.

After that go to the CleanStatus screen from Settings and disable the icons you don't want by sliding their status to "On".

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Don't forget to enable Clock Hide to complete the process.

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And here's the result of our customization. You can further customize the theme (such as adding a background image) by going to the "Root - Library - Themes" of your iOS device with the help of an application like iPhoneExplorer. But a complete explanation on how to do this would take another article, and it would bring our discussion out from the "easy" realm.

customize ios

Even though the process we've discussed here is simple, I hope it's enough to introduce you to the world of iOS customization. Don't forget to check out some of our other articles about jailbreaking and iOS devices such as Jailbreaking & iOS: The Pros And Cons Of Voiding Your Warranty, JailbreakMe 2.0: Easiest Way to Jailbreak Your iPhone, and How To Get Your Own iPhone Wallpapers and Themes.

Do you jailbreak your iOS device? Do you use themes? What's your favorite theme? Please share your thoughts using the comments below.

Image credit: toastr blog