For those of you who love your iPhone but don’t like the San Francisco typeface, developer Zhuowei Zhang has posted a great tool on Github. This tool is an app that allows you to temporarily “overwrite” the iOS system font with another font to give your phone a brand new iPhone that has not been approved by Apple. look.
This app does not require jailbreaking, but requires “iOS 16.1.2 and below” to work as it relies on a kernel execution bug (CVE-2022-46689) that was patched in iOS 16.2. If you have already installed iOS 16.2 (recommended for security reasons), you cannot try the hack. Font changes are reverted by device restarts, and apps that do not use the default San Francisco typeface will remain unchanged.
The app comes with a number of pre-installed fonts, many of which appear to be designed to pique the eye of Apple’s UI designers. Comic Sans MS leads in that regard, but also includes Segoe UI (the default font for Windows and Microsoft) and Samsung’s “Choco Cookie” (Comic Sans’ distant cousin). Custom fonts can be installed if they are iOS compatible.
Apple supported more extensive customization of the user interface back in the days of the original Mac OS, when everything from system fonts to window borders could be customized using the Appearance Manager. These settings are no longer in the first release of Mac OS X. Also, changing the look and feel of Apple’s operating systems has become increasingly difficult in recent years, as Apple has taken more and more steps to protect system files from modification and tampering (otherwise). .
Designing an interface around a single predictable font makes it easier to test and makes it harder for users to break something with weird monospaced typefaces that cause rendering errors. But looking at these screenshots, I wish the OS designers would leave it to me like they used to.
Listing image by Apple
