Make Your iPhone's Fingerprint Scanner More Useful with These Tweaks

The iPhone 5s fingerprint scanner, aka Touch ID, is a handy little feature that lets you unlock your phone with just a touch of your finger. Unfortunately, that's about all it does, but a handful of jailbreak tweaks make it way more awesome to use.

You'll need a jailbroken iPhone 5s to make use of these tweaks, but if you have one, they make a pretty good case for jailbreaking based on their innovation alone. If you haven't already, it's also useful to go in an make sure your fingerprints are scanned properly before you start playing around with these tweaks.

UnlockID ($2.99) is one of the more interesting uses of Touch ID that we've seen so far. It makes it so that you can unlock your Mac on your phone and insert and passwords using your fingerprint. You'll start by downloading UnlockID on your phone and then downloading the companion app on your Mac. From there, you'll pair the two over Bluetooth and use your phone to unlock your Mac. Once everything's set up, you can add usernames and passwords to the Mac app and use it to autofill passwords on web sites when you touch your finger to your phone's scanner. It's probably not as secure as a password manager like Lastpass, but it is a lot more fun to use.

BioProtect Locks Individual Apps with Your Fingerprint

BioProtect ($2.99) locks your apps, folders, and settings panes so they're not accessible unless you scan your fingerprint. When you first launch BioProtect you can go in and lock down your apps. To open one of those apps, you'll need to scan your fingerprint. This is pretty handy when you want to lock specific apps, but don't want to lock your phone completely.

When you jailbreak your iDevice you can change just about anything. One of the most notable adjustments comes from an often overlooked extension… Read…

Activator (free) has long been one of the most useful tweaks for iOS because it allows you to assign just about any action to a button press on your phone. Activator recently updated to work with the TouchID sensor, which means you can assign a touch of the sensor to any of the actions in Activator. That means you can set a TouchID scan to pause your music, launch an app, turn on a flashlight or just about anything else.

Touchy Launches Individual Apps Based on Fingerprints

Touchy (free) takes the opposite approach of BioProtect and allows you to launch apps with a fingerprint. What makes Touchy handy is that you can link one app to each fingerprint. For example, you can launch Twitter with your thumb and Chrome with your index finger. It's a surprisingly handy and useful little tweak for those apps you launch a lot.

Virtual Home Simulates a Home Button Press

Virtual Home (free) basically gives your home button a rest by allowing you to just tap the Touch ID instead of pressing the button. So, a single touch of the sensor brings you back to the home screen and a tap and hold pulls up the multitasking menu. It's simple, but it saves you a lot of wear on one of your iPhone's most used buttons.