iOS 14 has brought us a surprise that until now had been left out of the news. It is a novelty that until now was only possible by jailbreaking the iPhone, but now it can be done directly, so that we can fully customize the appearance of iOS. Here are a few examples.
Yes, indeed, what you see on these words is iOS 14 , without Jailbreak. As you can see, this level of customization on iOS was unthinkable until now. For some reason Apple has allowed the icon change of any App through the Shortcuts App.
Actually, you can totally and completely change the look of iOS until it is unrecognizable.
These customizations, however, involve paying a rather high price, because the Apps stop showing the number of notifications. In addition to that, when you open any of them, the Shortcuts App opens first and the App you clicked opens immediately afterwards. It’s relatively fast, but it’s a waste of system resources, and that impacts battery life, and the… well, iOS elegance because every App that you open causes what you see in this little video.
iOS 14 let’s you re-do app icons so naturally remade them all much worse in MS paint style
Sorry to all app icon designers that spent years making them nice pic.twitter.com/bsa0E5VvSy
— ❤️🔥💎Thomas Reisenegger_xcx💎❤️🔥 (@Olima) September 20, 2020
In spite of everything, if you want to do the same on your iPhone, these are the steps to follow;
- Open the Shortcuts App.
- Click on the + button and then add action.
- Search for Open App ( Open App ) and choose that option.
- Choose the App whose icon you want to change.
- Click on the button with the three dots at the top right of the screen.
- Then choose add to home screen.
- Click on the App icon to the left of the shortcut name.
- Choose a photo that you have on the roll, or take a photo with the iPhone camera. If you choose an image from the reel, you can choose an icon in PNG format, which you must have previously found and saved on the photo reel of your iPhone. Pinterest is a good place to look for icons, but Safari works too, using Google. Now that this has become fashionable, it is easy to find icon packs for iOS 14 on the Internet, with images of the icons of the most popular social media apps etc.
- Then click Add, then Done, and you’re done. If you go to the home screen, you will see that the App you have chosen now has the icon that you have selected later.
This functionality is therefore provided by one of the capabilities of the Shortcuts App, which is the one called, because the App icon is that. Then the App actually opens, because the Shortcuts App executes the open command. This is why clicking on any custom icon opens the Shortcuts App and then the App you really want to open.
It’s a bit long and complicated, of course, but with these icon packs and a suitable wallpaper you can make iOS look totally different.
Now we hope that Apple will see the popularity of this possibility and that in iOS 15 they decide to allow customizing the icon of each App without having to resort to the Shortcut App.
The rest of the changes that you see in these screenshots, such as the custom image widgets, are achieved with Color Widgets in the App Store .