With the debut of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus last month, Apple introduced several new features that are exclusive to the latest iPhone hardware. However, as in previous years, the recent release of a jailbreak for iOS 9 has allowed some of these features to be activated on older devices without requiring a new iPhone.
While you won’t be able to get things like the increased performance afforded by the A9 chip or the ability to record 4K video, you will be able to get a few strictly software-based features. Keep reading to learn how to enable 3D Touch shortcuts on your Home screen and Live Photos in the Camera app.
3D Touch shortcuts
You still won’t be able to take advantage of 3D Touch system-wide due to the lack of a force-sensitive display on older iPhones, but you can still benefit from the shortcuts available on the Home screen. A new, free tweak called Forcy will allow you to swipe up on your home screen icons to access their 3D Touch menus.
Forcy was even updated today with a new setting that lets you switch the gesture to a long press. Doing so will let you swipe up on the icons to enter “wiggle mode” for rearranging or deleting apps. An option to enable a vibration, or haptic feedback, when you activate the tweak has also been added.
You can download Forcy from the BigBoss repo for free.
Live Photos
To easily activate the Live Photos feature, you can use the popular and versatile Flex tweak. Flex allows you to download simple but powerful patches. One of the few camera patches available for iOS 9+ right now can enable Live Photos on older devices.
Once you’ve activated the patch, you can find the Live Photos button at the top of the Camera app. Turning the feature on will let you snap the same Live Photos you’ll find on the iPhone 6s minus the bumped up 12MP resolution. To play back the video portion of the recording, you just have to do a long press on the image, no “force” required.
A second option for enabling this feature is also available. This tweak, while less versatile than Flex, it will activate Live Photos in the Camera app without any issues.
Flex is available on the BigBoss repo for $3.99. EnableLivePhotos is free.
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Seriously considering jailbreaking again right now. Especially for the 3D Touch icons.
Headline is misleading. It’s not 3D Touch as 3D Touch is more than software and includes the Taptic Engine which obviously doesn’t exist in older phones. This is a hack that shouldn’t be called 3D Touch.
The marketing scheme of “3D touch” is misleading to begin with
why?
As for the live photos, couldn’t one of the third-party camera apps add something like that? Camera+ for example?
EnableLivePhotos tweak – and you will be reborn :D
It’s unacceptable that you should jailbreak to get something that your iPhone hardware is perfectly capable of (I’m talking about live photos). I understand the lack of 3D Touch (and the gesture is pretty lame to be honest), but Live Photos should work also in previous iPhones. Bad move from Apple…
add the selfie flash to the list of ridiculous software capabilities that apple is refusing to enable on older phones. several apps use the screen as a flash so i have no idea why apple didn’t enable it for everyone in ios9.
Because if you add those to older phones, the numbers of features that justify buying a 6s instead of a 5 or 5s is reduced to only 1.: the 12mp camera. Apple is running out of ideas.
I meant 6 or 5s. Can’t edit my post.
And the iSight 12 mp camera isn’t that much better then the camera from the 6. Seems like the update f
Ace time camera would made a big difference, but from the reviews I see. It isn’t that much of an improvement either. Makes me glad I’m in a 2 year non s upgrade cycle.
I wish the new fish dynamic wall papers were available on the 6
i think both cameras are good updates. the increase to 12mp really helps with cropping after the fact, which for me was the biggest downside of staying at 8mp for so long.
selfie flash is actually hardware restricted, it has a backlight capable of going 300% brighter than the ones on previous iPhones. the only feature the your old phone should have is live photos as theres not real reason not to have it.
What you just wrote is pretty lame to be honest. When I find hilarious is everyone seems to think live photos is just a gimmick but then they b*tch about it not being available on older phones.
I think it’s a gimmick and now that I’ve been able to activate it on my iPhone 6 I see that I was right. Sure, it’s lame of Apple to withhold software features for new phones, but that doesn’t mean those features aren’t a gimmick.
I said the same thing when In App Apple Pay came out and it was ONLY available on the 6/6+…Ridiculous, the 5S has TouchID as well; NFC is NOT required for in-app purchases! Apple does not care what their previous customers think…if they did we would have in-app ApplePay on the 5S, Live Photos on everything, and 3D Touch with the ability to activate it with a long press in the settings (or turn it on and off) on everything.
Again, wrong. The information generated from your credit card is not stored in the devices flash memory. It’s also not stored in the processor’s Secure Enclave, but rather in the NFC’s Secure Element. Confusing naming, I know.
“Full card numbers are not stored on the device or on Apple servers. Instead, a unique Device Account Number is created, encrypted, and then stored in the Secure Element.”
It’s the reason that the iPad Air 2 has an NFC chip, but no antennas (because who wants to pay at a store with their iPad…). Unlike Google, who is willing to compromise you security for convenience, Apple is not. Your credit card information never touches the phone’s processor when you make a payment.
“Communication between the Secure Enclave and the Secure Element takes place over a serial interface, with the Secure Element connected to the NFC controller, which in turn is connected to the application processor. Even though not directly connected, the Secure Enclave and Secure Element can communicate securely using a shared pairing key that is provisioned during the manufacturing process. The encryption and authentication of the communication is based on AES, with cryptographic nonces used by both sides to protect against replay attacks. The pairing key is generated inside the Secure Enclave from its UID key and the Secure Element’s unique identifier. The pairing key is then securely transferred from the Secure Enclave to a hardware security module (HSM) in the factory, which has the key material required to then inject the pairing key into the Secure Element.”
I’ll agree with you, there’s some things that apple could do. For the most part though, they have good reason for making the decisions that they do. No, It is not possible for the 5S, technologically speaking, to make ApplePay payments. The reason that you can make an in-app payment, is because Apple has your billing information for iTunes. They simply charge it to your iTunes Account. Apple can’t make generic payments from their servers on behalf of you.
As for 3D Touch, you can’t just use a Long Press, as those are already a gesture for something else. Swiping upwards is also a stupid gesture, and frequently also used for other things.
Live Photos…. this one could probably be added to older iPhones, but I’m sure that apple has some kind of hardware acceleration in place. The device has dedicated silicon for just about everything it does. Surely the new Processor has a dedicated DSP built in for compressing the JPGs live, so it doesn’t have to take up processor time. It might also have something to do with RAM. Try taking video while in a phone call with the iPhone 6, you can’t do it.
Sources:
https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/10/24/new-ipad-air-2-ipad-mini-3-incorporate-nfc-chip-for-apple-pay-in-apps-but-not-in-store-tap-to-pay-transactions
P.S.
I’m not sure how well versed in technology you are, but the feats that Apple achieves when it comes to software and hardware are incredible. Chris Lattner, the person that wrote the programming language Swift, is the same guy that wrote LLVM, LLDB, and the Clang front end for LLVM. Clang/LLVM is currently the least resource intensive compiler when it comes to C/C++. It’s currently used for the vast majority of compiler related research projects, due to it’s ability to easily extend any portion of Lexical analysis, Parsing, Semantic interpreting, and code generation.
Apple has the best engineers in the world, bar none when it comes to Software.
I’ll be impressed when someone can get me LivePhotos without having to press the dang screen. I just want them to autoplay upon the phone waking up (with the option to turn off, of course). Probably wont have that until iOS XV.
Gripe asside, 3D Touch (peek & pop) and live photos are both pretty dang sweet and I enjoy them.
I used to jailbreak my iPhone all the time. . Since having a iPad. I have kept my iPhone 6 jailbreak free. I always found once my iphone had been jailbroken it never seems to be the same even after a full restore. Im still sticking to jailbreaking my iPad tbh only do it for a few things such as kodi and moviebox. Will definitely check out the new tweaks.
Purposefully opening a huge malware vector to software created by anonymous actors is simply a very dumb idea. Jail breaking is just that.
Most of the big names in jailbreaking aren’t anonymous and you’re not really that open to attacks as long as you’re not stupid about what you do with your phone.
is it native? can you sync with apple watch?
I always laugh that Pangu releases their jailbreak hack on the windows platform for an Apple product. It’s only 4 to 5 months later is the hack released for OSX
I agree – Apple is running out of ideas
If the previous phones are capable of swiping up on an app icon to reveal hidden menus, and previous cameras are capable of live photos, then Apple should allow this…
People shouldnt have to jailbreak a phone just to get Apple features to work… essentially the hardware isnt really limiting the software for certain features, Apple is just choosing not to allow them to be on previous devices…
I can understand the force touch kinda being an issue – but live photos should be on the 6 and 6 plus… after all they do have the cpu power and the camera is still very good and more than capable…
I will not jailbreak my iPhone6 to have a fake 3D touch or little useful Live Photos, but I’d certainly jailbreak my iPad Air if someone find the way to activate SplitView on older devices. That would be an interesting hack.
There is a hack for using all the iOS 9 multitasking features on older iPads.
I don’t have an iPad so I don’t know how well it works, but I believe it was called “Medusa for iPad”
There’s a tweak to enable split view/slideover on iphones and older ipads, but right now it’s very buggy and there are many reports that it makes your device unable to go into landscape mode.
*cydia tweak
Multiplexer Cyrus tweak for split screen
You can sort of get the live photo effect via holding the camera’s button down and taking a burst of images, then adding them all to iMovie app. More laborious, for sure, but safer security than jailbnreaking.
If you are interested you can try Live Editor, on App Store. I have written the application partly to make available live photos on older devices
Take Live Photos on all other devices with this awesome app ;) https://www.facebook.com/LivePhotoCamera
Only iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus can take the Live Photos. But other iPhone which is running on iOS 9 or later can see the live photos. So if an iPhone 6s users share live photos with you, you can see it on your iPhone. But yoou need to use the right way. Here are the right way to share live photos with friends and family. We also have a topic about iPhone photos. Hope you like it.