Unlike Apple’s Mac lineup, the company’s iOS devices don’t offer a native ‘guest mode.’ This is a crying shame for anyone who wants to share their device with someone else while keeping the peace of mind that the other person won’t be peering through any personal data.
Fortunately, jailbreakers have long had the option of installing guest mode-centric jailbreak tweaks, and LendMyPhone 3 by iOS developers Luke Muris and Geometric Software offers one of the slickest guest mode interfaces we’ve seen yet.
The name should sound familiar, and that’s because LendMyPhone 3 is an iOS 13-compatible remake of the popular LendMyPhone tweak that we showed you back in September. Just like the original, LendMyPhone 3 will let you prevent users from accessing certain features of iOS, such as:
- Specific apps that you’ve locked down for privacy or security reasons
- Control Center and its powerful line of toggles
- Editing the layout of your Home screen app icons
- Killing previously-used apps from your App Switcher
- Opening potentially-private notifications from Notification Center
- Searching your device’s contents via Spotlight search
Once installed, you’ll find a preference pane for LendMyPhone 3 in the Settings app where you can set the tweak up to your specific needs:
Here, you can:
- Toggle the tweak on or off on demand
- Create and manage guest users
When you begin adding a new guest account, you’ll be asked to enter pertinent information:
You’ll be configuring things like:
- Profile picture
- Account name
- Unique passcode
After you’ve created the account, you can designate specific rules for that guest user:
Options here include:
- Toggle prevent App Switcher app-killing
- Designate a specific passcode for that user to activate their specific guest mode
- Toggle disable access to Control Center
- Toggle disable Home screen icon layout change
- Toggle disable access to App Switcher
- Toggle disable Notification Center
- Toggle disable Spotlight search
- Choose the apps that the user can use
The plethora of options that LendMyPhone 3 comes with will enable any iOS device owner to have full-fledged control over what other users can access. It could be considered useful for both family members and complete strangers.
We particularly like that you can designate a custom passcode for the Guest User because you’ll essentially give that person their specific passcode and they’ll unlock your device with it thinking that it’s the same one you use. There’s no splash screen, so the user wouldn’t actually know that they were in guest mode unless you told them.
If you’re interested in adding this type of guest mode functionality to your iPhone or iPad, then you can download LendMyPhone 3 from the Geometric Software repository for $3.99 via your preferred package manager. The tweak supports jailbroken iOS 13 devices..
Is a guest mode function something that you would use regularly on your iPhone or iPad? Let us know by dropping a comment below.