Cydia Tweak: Spin Turns The iOS Lock Screen Music Controls Upside Down

The default iOS Lock screen Music app controls might do their job well, but countless jailbreak tweaks have aimed to improve them over the years. One of the latest is Spin, a recent addition to the Cydia Store that offers a radically different Lock screen control system for the iOS Music app.

You can pick up Spin in the Cydia Store for $0.99, and it's optimized for iOS 7. Once installed, you'll find that a new layout for the Lock screen Music app control system is available to enable from Spin's dedicated Settings app preferences pane (a respring is required), and upon doing so, the traditional Lock screen music controls will be replaced with a new, circular user interface (UI).

Album artwork will appear in the center of the Lock screen, and surrounding this is a circular toggle which allows users to see their progress through the track that's currently playing. Further down at the bottom of Spin's UI are three other circular buttons: previous track, play and pause, and next track.

Information on the track features at the top of the Lock screen, and this includes the usual track name and artist, along with a timer. However, Spin is far from a perfect alternative to the Lock screen music controls.

Problematically, the jailbreak tweak conflicts with the “Slide to Unlock” mechanism built into Apple's iOS. The only way to resolve this appears to be to enable a toggle in Spin's preferences pane labeled “Background Artwork,” but as the package's developer indeed acknowledges, this results in a lot of lag.

As such, we'd advise jailbreakers to avoid Spin – at least until the developer has improved the package's performance. Spin is available in the Cydia Store for $0.99, but in its current form, iOS device owners aren't going to enjoy using the new jailbreak tweak.

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