A lot of times when playing full-screen games on my iPhone, I wonder what time it is or how much battery life I have left. It’s inconvenient to pause my game to peek at Control Center or swipe out of the app to glance at the Status Bar, and so I was particularly excited when I saw a new free jailbreak tweak called NCGrabberInfo by iOS developer Antique.

With this tweak, you can grab a peek at both the time and your handset’s remaining battery life even when you’re enjoying a full-screen game; and the best part is, you don’t need to stop playing or leave the app to do it.

You’ve likely noticed while playing full-screen games that swiping down from the top of the display reveals a small and seemingly insignificant Notification Center grabber rather than flat-out launching Notification Center. This was a two-step process implemented by Apple to prevent accidental Notification Center launches during immersive full-screen experiences.

But NCGrabberInfo improves the Notification Center grabber by incorporating pertinent information about your handset inside of the grabber itself, such as the current time and your handset’s remaining battery life, as shown above.

As you might come to expect, you can still swipe down on the new and improved Notification Center grabber to launch the full-fledged Notification Center interface. The only difference is that the grabber itself now displays useful information rather than displaying zilch.

NCGrabberInfo doesn’t come with any options to configure, so what you see is what you get. But I don’t consider that to be a weak point in the tweak because the execution is seemingly flawless as is, and furthermore, I wish Apple would implement something of this nature in the stock installation of iOS.

If you’re interested in trying NCGrabberInfo for yourself, then you can download it for free from Cydia’s Packix repository. The tweak plays nicely with all jailbroken handsets running iOS 11 or 12.

Do you consider NCGrabberInfo to be an improvement over the stock Notification Center grabber? Discuss in the comments section below.