iOS 16 brings the most radical change to the iPhone Lock Screen yet. In the new operating system, you can customize and totally transform the look and feel of your phone. If you liked the themed custom Home Screens people were putting together using Shortcuts and Widgetsmith, you’ll love the level of creativity you can express with customized Lock Screens in iOS 16.
Read on to see all the features of the new iOS 16 Lock Screen.
Apple showcased an impressive lineup of improvements to Focus modes at WWDC22 Monday. They include Focus-linked custom Lock Screens, set-up suggestions, new filters and more.
The upgrades should provide users with customized ways to cut down on distractions more effectively, especially now that Focus can provide a new level of control by setting boundaries within apps.
Apple showcased many significant new features coming in iOS 16 during its WWDC22 keynote Monday. The main updates include an overhaul of the iPhone Lock Screen, updated notifications management, intelligent sharing and a slew of personalization features.
“iOS 16 offers new intelligence sharing and communication features that are going to enhance so much of what you do with your iPhone,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief, during the event. “And those come together with an incredible set of new personalization features that will make your experience feel fresh and completely you.”
If you’ve upgraded to iOS 12.1 already, you might want to be careful about where you leave your iPhone. It turns out that a new lock screen flaw lets anyone access your contacts without your passcode. The video below shows you how it’s exploited.
Having your notifications displayed on your iPhone’s lock screen is incredibly convenient. But it leaves them exposed to prying eyes. That’s no longer a worry with iPhone X, which won’t reveal your lock screen notifications to anyone but you.
If you’ve ever tried to set a square photo as your lock screen or homes screen wallpaper, you know that iOS will zoom into the photo, resizing it to fit the entire iPhone screen.
This is fine with some images, but square ones, like the ones you save on Instagram or take with your iPhone’s square photo feature, just zoom in too far, obscuring much of the photo.
Here’s a quick and easy work around that will let you see the whole square photo when you use it as wallpaper.
Through the creation of its Find my iPhone feature, Apple has made it much easier to recover handsets when we misplace them.
However, one amusing iPhone owner decided to go one step further to ensure that he would be reunited with his iPhone should it stray from his hands during a night of drunken merriment — adding an hilarious iPhone lock screen message.
Are you the kind of person that likes all of their tech to match up, or else someone that just really loves the iOS lock screen? Either way, you may wish to download a new OS X screensaver, which provides the iOS 7 lock screen experience for Mac users.
Referred to as “Swipey”, a new jailbreak tweak allows iOS 7 users to access six different apps via a left swipe from their iDevice lock screen — giving you all the features associated with a lock screen launcher, minus the clutter.
You may know that your Mac can send you notifications via the native Notifications Center, introduced in OS X Mountain Lion. You can get notified via a pop up badge or alert window for various activities, like iMessages, Calendar events, FaceTime calls, or Game Center achievements, just to name a few.
In Mavericks, you can even get these messages when your screen is locked with a password via the Privacy system preferences option. Your notification alerts will show up on top of your lock screen.
But what if you want to preserver your privacy when you lock your Mac’s screen but you don’t want to enable Do Not Disturb mode?
I like some notifications. I try to keep it down to a dull roar, of course, but I enjoy knowing when I get a phone call, text message, and email from specific clients or friends.
It’s just that when I see all these notifications in my lockscreen, I mentally dismiss them, only to have them appear again the next time I check my iPhone for the time.
I messed around with it a bit yesterday, and came up with this solution, thanks to iOS 7.
Apple released iOS 7.0.2 on Thursday, and in its release notes, the company said it had fixed “bugs that could allow someone to bypass the lock screen passcode.” Unfortunately, it seems it didn’t fix all of them, because the update added another lock screen vulnerability of its own, which you can see in the video below.
Notification Center has new tabs now, including Today, All, and Missed notifications. Even with this bit of filtering, things can get overwhelming fast, especially if you have a ton of apps that default to sending notifications to you for darn near everything.
If you want to lower the amount of information overload in your Notifications Center, it’s a fairly simple affair. Here’s how.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and while Apple has tested this assumption in court against Samsung and other mobile device manufacturers, Android users and developers might have a different opinion.
Because, as you can see from the screenshot above, a whole bunch of apps have appeared in the Google Play store with the express purpose of making your Android handset look just like…well, an iPhone running iOS 7.
Of course, the argument could be made that only Android is open enough to actually allow its users to change the look and feel of their devices to a competing system’s visual system, but the result is still clear: Android developers, at least, think that you should be able to have a mobile phone that looks like the latest iOS devices on the screen as well as in the design of the handset itself.
Hit some of those links above to try these out on your own, because we all know it’d be cool to have an Android phone that looks like an iPhone running iOS 7.
iOS 7 beta has a great new feature in the Notification Center system called Today. This is an attempt, perhaps, to counter Google Now with more useful current information available to you right on your iPhone or iPad’s lock screen.
You can enable the Summary, Traffic Conditions, Day View, Reminders, Stocks, and Tomorrow’s Summary right in the Notification Center, and make it available right on your lock screen, without having to type in your security passcode.
Here’s how to enable, and then manage, this new feature in iOS 7 beta.
In the new OS X Mavericks beta, there’s a new Notification system in place that mimics much of the way iOS handles notifications. Your iOS notifications, in fact, can push right to your Mac desktop as well.
Much like iOS, each app that uses Notification Center can be set to a fine-grained level of customization, letting you show them in Notification Center (activated with the icon in the upper right corner of your Mac’s screen), decide whether to let them use a Badge app icon, and whether or not to play a sound for each app’s notifications.
If, however, you value your privacy, you may want to disable the default setting that has your notifications showing up even when the display is off or locked.
File this one under super cool! In previous incarnations of iOS, you’ve always been able to set a photo from your camera roll as the image that shows up on your iPhone or iPad screen. You can place one image on your lock screen, and one as your wallpaper, or the same image on both screens.
Now, however, in iOS 7 beta, you can actually set panoramas as your lock screen image, or as your wallpaper image. Or both! When you do so, the iPhone or iPad will show your panoramic image in full size, which lets you move the device around in a circle and see the whole image dynamically move across your screen.
There are a number of tweaks you can install on your jailbroken iOS device that’ll add quick settings toggles to your lock screen, but some of them are far more complicated — and more ugly — than they need to be. LockscreenToggles takes the concept back to basics to ensure it isn’t one of them.
There are a number of tweaks for jailbroken iOS devices that add alternative security measures to your lock screen, but Piano Passcode is possibly one of the craziest. Rather than typing a code or drawing a pattern, you have to play it a tune on a set of virtual keys.
Grabby, a new tweak from esteemed jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich, allows you to quickly launch your most frequently used apps from your iPhone’s lock screen by extending the functionality of the built-in camera slider. Find out more about how it works and where to download it below.
Apple lets you control music playback on your iOS devices from the lock screen, but your options are very limited; you can play or pause tracks, and skip back and forth between them. But if you want to listen to another album, you’ll need to unlock your device and open the Music app to find it.
But not if you have Pluck installed. Pluck is a new tweak for jailbroken iOS devices that lets you access your entire music library from the lock screen.
The interface designer behind the Auxo app-switcher concept (@Sentry_NC) has come up with another fantastic idea, this time aiming his attention at the Lock Screen of iOS. In this new concept, iPhone and iPad users would be able to swipe over from the right hand side of their device screen, revealing a host of settings that typically require launching the Settings app for.
You can get so accustomed to swiping to unlock your iPhone and iPad, that by comparison, clicking to awaken your dozing MacBook seems so… unceremonious. Now SquidMelon brings password-protected “Swipe to Unlock” to the Mac with a new app, Lock Screen Plus.