Fingal Themes Your iOS Home Screen With Animated Icons

Themes are by far the most abundant and, most likely, popular items on the Cydia store, and one can see why. It’s no secret that Apple has made changes to its mobile OS using ideas and implementations that debuted on the jailbreak store. From the Notification Center and system toggles in the Control Center to multitasking gestures and system Settings, there are more than just a few parts of iOS that seem to have been inspired from Cydia tweaks and apps. A recent example would be the new Night Shift feature in the upcoming iOS 9.3 update, which is more or less a clone of the popular jailbreak tweak f.lux.

One thing that still hasn’t made its way to Apple’s mobile firmware is the option apply themes, and there seem to be no signs of the feature being added any time soon, if ever. Meanwhile, in addition to the many themes that continue to flow into Cydia’s default repositories every single day, the store keeps getting new ways to customize the way iOS looks and feels. The latest entry in said genre is Charlie Hewitt’s Fingal – an icon theming platform for iOS 9 and 8 that allows you to replace your boring Home screen app icons with animated ones.

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Fingal currently comes packed with a handful of example icons that you can apply from within the configuration menu it adds to the Settings app. You’ll find the Basic Example Theme disabled by default. To enable the theme, tap and hold the rearrange symbol to its right, drag it upwards into the Enabled Themes list, and hit the Respring option in the top-right corner. Third-party themes, once downloaded from Cydia, will always appear in the Disabled Themes list and will have to be enabled the same way. Like WinterBoard and Anemone, you can apply multiple themes at a time, though if two themes alter the same icon, Fingal will pick the one higher in the Enabled Themes list.

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We ourselves took AhmadNagy’s ShakeIt for a spin and weren’t disappointed. The theme, which can be downloaded for free from the ZodTTD & MacCiti source, offers a collection of animated icons for 12 default and third-party apps (including Camera, Settings, Phone, Messages, Twitter, Google Maps and YouTube) with designs that take after the original icons, bringing your Home screen to life without changing its look. If you’d rather not have all these icons animated at the same time, you can download ShakeIt Plus to apply select icons.

Maps animated icon ShakeIt Fingal iPhone

We have’t been able to find any other third-party Fingal themes just yet, though the tweak has only been out a couple weeks on the developer’s repository and a couple days on ModMyi. A post on the /r/jailbreak subreddit suggests a couple third-party icon packs for Fingal have already been released with quite a few more currently in the works.

Unlike Apple’s very own animated Clock app icon, these won’t really be able to offer any sort of utility and will cause your device to consume battery a tad faster when you’re on the Home screen, but that’s a small price to pay for the wow factor they’ll add to your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

Fingal is available for free on the ModMyi repository.

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Sameed Khan

I write, game, design at times, and revel in sarcasm. You can find me on Twitter.