Messaging is one of the main reasons why people purchase smartphones. iOS 7 allows users to send a text message as well as an iMessage to another person who also owns an iOS device. If you’ve jailbroken your iOS device, which you can learn how to jailbreak iOS 7 here, you’re lucky because you can now customize the stock Messages app on iOS 7 with a new tweak called MessageEnhancer.
The cydia app provides you with tons of options that allow you to customize the Messages app the way you want. These options include:
- View Messages app in full screen
- Dark Messages keyboard
- Contact Photos in messages list
- Contact Photos in conversation
- Small convo list
- Wider chat bubbles
- Always auto-compose
- Blue SMS
- Disable “Return” key
- Load all messages instead of showing “Load Earlier Messages”
- Bigger text field
- View older messages at the top
Additionally, MessageEnhancer allows you to hide the following elements:
- Separators
- Search bar
- Bubble tails
- “Delivered” label
- Sending Progress bar
- Camera button
- List chevron
Once you’ve installed MessageEnhancer, you’ll have to head to the cydia apps preferences pane from the Settings app in order to enable/disable the options listed earlier. If you’re using a 64-bit device such as an iPhone 5s, you’re required to respring your device every time that you make changes. To do so, tap on the “Respring” button at the bottom of the tweak’s preference pane to respring your device and apply the new changes.
Some of the issues that I faced while using the tweak on my iOS 7.0.4 iPhone 5s was that the messages bubbles would show nothing when you enable “Wide Chat Bubbles”. Also if you enable the “Contact Photos in List” option, it wouldn’t show it and the message previews also overlap with the contact names when “Small Convo List” is enabled.
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Overall, the cydia app does have a lot of issues when installed on iPhone 5s and I wouldn’t recommend you to try it, unless they are fixed. Yet, if you want to take it for a spin and see how it works, you can install MessageEnhancer for free via Cydia’s BigBoss repository.