The best reason to jailbreak your iPhone? Fixing your notifications with Notified Pro

Apple’s notification system on the iPhone is broken and the only current fix for it is an app for jailbroken iPhones.

As Apple has improved the iPhone, many of the reasons to jailbreak your phone have gone away. Over the past three years they’ve added multitasking, tethering, and a WiFi hotspot feature, capabilities that were available to jailbroken iPhone users well before Apple implemented them. This has led to there being less of a need to jailbreak your phone, although there are still some very compelling reasons to do so.

One reason to jailbreak that has not gone away is a fix for notifications. It’s a broken system and Notified Pro, a $5 app for jailbroken iPhones, can fix it for you.

The annoying pop-up notifications that the iPhone currently uses are frustrating and interruptive. They make getting several notifications from different apps in a row a real problem when you’re trying to get anything done on your iPhone. It’s gotten so bad that I had disabled notifications altogether before I found Notified Pro.

Notified Pro is an app that requires a jailbroken iPhone to run. This is because Apple doesn’t allow apps to tinker with core features of the iPhone like notifications.

The app is available for download via Cydia, the jailbroken app store for $4.99. It’s probably the best money I’ve spent on a productivity app for the iPhone since I first purchased the handset. After you install the app be sure to grab the ‘Statusbar’ plugin for Notified as well, it’s what places your notifications up in the status bar of your iPhone.

Once you have the app installed, pay a visit to it’s icon on your Springboard to set up a few options. I turned off all popup notifications entirely for all of the major apps that I use. I also told it to stop notifying me about email entirely. You can choose individually how each type of notification occurs.

Here’s how the app behaves once you have it installed and configured.

Any notification that comes in is automatically routed up to your status bar. Once the message appears, you can tap on the bar to make it go away, leaving behind a small status bar icon that reflects the type of notification that it was.

If you want further info about the notification, just pull downwards on the status bar to read it and tap on the item to launch the app that it coincides with. This gesture can be set to anything you like using the settings of Activator, a gesture based launching system that gets installed along with Notified.

With only a couple minutes of setup, Notified becomes the notification system that you’ve always wanted on your iPhone. It combines the best of what’s good about Android with the smoothness and solidity of the iOS platform.

I highly recommend Notified to anyone who has to deal with tons of notifications and just can’t take the way that the iPhone handles them any more.

Note: If you want the latest version of Notified Pro, add the beta repository to Cydia and install it from there. There are many general improvements. To install the beta version, add the source http://beta.notifiedapp.com to Cydia. If you have Notified Pro already installed, it will show as an update.