Cydia Tweak: Add A Useful Extra Row To Your iOS Keyboard With exKey

by Joe White

January 29, 2014

Are you looking to type more efficiently using the iOS keyboard? Until a system-wide version of the third-party Swype keyboard reaches the Cydia Store, jailbreakers can make do with exKey - a jailbreak tweak that adds a useful extra row of virtual keys to the built-in iOS keyboard. You can download exKey for $0.99 in the Cydia Store, and it’s optimized for iOS 5, iOS 6, and iOS 7, as well as for ARM64-iDevices like the iPhone 5s.

Once downloaded and installed, the extra row added by the jailbreak tweak will display a selection of useful buttons depending on your iOS keyboard mode. For example, when the keyboard displays the default “QWERTY” keys, the extra row added by exKey will feature numbers, from zero to nine.

However, once users switch over to the numeric keyboard, the exKey row of keys switches over to display special characters, such as the plus sign, the the hash symbol, and the percentage symbol. Below, we’ve included the two keyboard layouts for readers to take a closer look at:

It’s definitely a useful jailbreak tweak, if for the added row of numbers alone. How often do you find yourself switching keyboards in order to input numbers into text fields? A lot, I’ll bet. Once exKey is installed, the process of inputting letters and numbers is obviously made a whole lot easier, albeit at the expense of a small amount of screen space.

The functionality of exKey is the worth this trade-off, though, and jailbreakers will barely notice the difference - especially if they’re using one of Apple’s 4-inch iPhones.

If you’re interested in enhancing the iOS keyboard, take a look at exKey. As mentioned, the jailbreak tweak is available to download for $0.99 and it’s optimized for iOS 7.