How to Enable Multi-Touch Gestures in iOS 4.3.1 for iPhone 4, iPod Touch and iPad

Remember the four and five finger multi-touch gestures shown off by Apple in the iOS 4.3 Beta for iPad. However, these features were only meant for the developers and never made it to the final public release of iOS 4.3.

Now, there is a way to enable multitouch gestures in iOS 4.3.1. All you need is a jailbroken iPhone 4/3GS, iPod Touch or iPad running iOS 4.3.1 and some tweaking.

We will be editing some plist files in this tutorial. Windows users can use plist editor while Mac users can use TextWrangler. If you have Xcode installed then no need for an additional application. I’ll be using iFile app which is available on Cydia.

There is a simple tweak available in Cydia which you can simply search for and run check it out here

Instructions:

Step 1:

Navigate to Root > var > mobile > Library > Preferences > com.apple.springboard.plist

Copy this file to your computer and add the following two lines of code:

<key>SBUseSystemGestures</key>
<true/>

Step 2:

Navigate to Root > System > Library > CoreServices > SpringBoard.app > N90AP.plist

Update: N90AP.plist exists on iPhone 4 only. The corresponding file for iPhone 3GS is N88AP.plist, iPod Touch is N81AP.plist and for iPad K48AP.plist. Usually, there’s just one of this file’s kind in the specified folder, so it should not be very difficult to identify.

Add the following two lines:

<key>multitasking-gestures</key>
<true/>

That’s it. We’re done. After you have saved these edit files put them back in their locations and restart or respring your iOS device for the changes to take effect.

You can now do the following three gestures using four fingers, though in my opinion the iPhone or iPod Touch screens are too small for these many fingers.

• Pinch to home screen
• Swipe up for Multitasking bar
• Swipe left/right to switch apps.