There are plenty of advantages Apple’s iPhone lineup has over rival smartphones. They’re faster, smoother and far more refined by most measures, and they’re supported by a third-party app ecosystem with quality that is completely unmatched. Every smartphone supports apps, of course, but none are as consistent as iOS apps and none offer the same level of quality. Even big-name developers that develop apps for multiple platforms have said as much.
But nothing is perfect, of course, and iOS definitely has its shortcomings. One of the most common gripes among savvy smartphone users is that iOS isn’t customizable enough, and it’s certainly a valid complaint. In this post, we’re going to show you a crazy glitch in iOS that will let you customize the appearance of your iPhone so that it looks completely different from anyone else’s. And the best part is that you don’t even need to jailbreak your device.
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We’ve covered a few different iOS glitches in the past here on BGR. There’s obviously nothing Earth-shattering about them, but it’s a fun way set your iPhone apart from the pack. Now that Apple’s iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are about to be released after crushing previous preorder records, pretty much everyone around you is going to have an iPhone that looks exactly like yours.
This trick that lets you make the folders on your iPhone circles instead of rounded squares is a perfect example. Here’s another trick that lets you transform your iPhone wallpaper into an optical illusion.
Now, the person who has been discovering all these tricks in iOS is back with a new one that lets you manipulate your iPhone’s home screen in a few different nifty ways. Again, we’ll remind you that nothing we’re about to cover involves jailbreaking your phone or doing anything that might cause a problem. For whatever reason, iOS gets glitchy when you apply certain wallpapers, and the results are often quite cool.
The image at the top of the screen shows what happens when you apply a certain wallpaper created by Twitter user “heyeased” to your iPhone’s home screen. The wallpaper is actually just a single black pixel, but by saving the image and applying it as your wallpaper, iOS stretches it out to fit your screen and gets glitchy in the process.
Heyeased has a blog post explaining how it works. In a nutshell, all you need to do is visit this page from your iPhone, then download the tiny black wallpaper you see there by tapping and holding on it. Apply that image as your home screen wallpaper, and that’s it! If it doesn’t work for you right away, you probably have “Reduce Transparency” enabled. Just open Settings > General > Accessibility > Increase Contrast and toggle “Reduce Transparency” to off.
Two things happen once you apply the wallpaper: your dock will vanish and the background of your folder icons will vanish. Now just play around with your home screen layout to put this nifty glitch to work.
If complete and total darkness isn’t your thing, there are also other more colorful wallpapers available that will create different effects when you apply them. Some will make your folder icons vanish, some will make them circles instead of rounded squares, and some will make your dock disappear. You’ll find a bunch of them in this post, and they’re definitely worth checking out.
