Destra brings macOS-inspired notifications to jailbroken iPhones & iPads

You can receive push notifications on a Mac just as you can on an iPhone or iPad. With that in mind, one thing that has always stood out to me as a rather peculiar design choice on Apple’s part is how notification banners appear on the right side of the screen on a Mac and in the center of the display on an iPhone or iPad.

Centered notification banners make sense on the iPhone because of the limited screen real estate, but having right-aligned banner notifications to the iPad would evoke a desktop-esque user experience much like what you’d have on a Mac. If that sounds like a good idea to you, then we think you’ll love a newly released jailbreak tweak called Destra by iOS developer Jax Roth.

As shown in the screenshot examples above, Destra tweaks the appearance of your iPhone or iPad’s incoming banner notifications to make them look more how they would on macOS. It also aligns them to the right side of your display by default rather than centering them.

And for those curious, here’s a screenshot depicting what the Destra tweak looks like on an iPhone:

One thing you may notice right off the bat is that Destra looks the best on an iPad, and that’s because there’s a lot more screen real estate to accommodate the right-aligned notification banners. For whatever reason, I just can’t bring myself to like the right-aligned notification look on the iPhone, but the option is certainly there if you disagree with me – and that’s okay.

Once installed, users can make adjustments to the notification banner appearance and behavior:

Options here include:

• Enable or disable Destra on demand
• Choose your preferred notification banner alignment:
• Adjust the banner notification size with respect to your display size – default is 33% of your display’s width
• Enable or disable notification banner stacking

The developer provides a handy Respring button in the preference pane so that you can save the changes you make on demand.

If having macOS-inspired notification banners on your jailbroken iPhone or iPad seems like a good idea to you, then you can purchase the Destra tweak for $0.99 from the Packix repository via your favorite package manager, and is 50% off for the first week if you already own any of Jax Roth’s other jailbreak tweaks. Destra supports jailbroken iOS 13 devices.

Do you plan to give Destra a try, or are you satisfied with the look of your iPhone or iPad’s stock notification banners? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.