The LendMyPhone series of jailbreak tweaks by iOS developer GeometricSoftware is so good that we’ve been showing it to our readers every time the developer launches their latest iteration for the newest strain of iOS & iPadOS, and this year will be no different.
While we previously showed you LendMyPhone 4 for iOS & iPadOS 14, GeometricSoftware has just this week unleashed LendMyPhone 5 for jailbroken iOS & iPadOS 15 and 16 devices with the same mission statement of giving users the ability to incorporate a Mac-inspired guest mode on their iPhone or iPad.
With LendMyPhone 5, you can make a guest account in your iPhone or iPad so that you can let somebody else use your device without the worry that they’ll be going through your apps and data. That’s because the tweak supports a ton of features to protect your device and information including:
- Locking down specific apps to prevent the user from accessing them
- Preventing the user from accessing certain Control Center toggles
- Preventing the user from changing your Home Screen layout
- Preventing the user from forcefully-quitting apps from the App Switcher
- Preventing the user from opening notifications from Notification Center
- Preventing the user from using Spotlight search to find files on your device
When you set up a user account on your device with LendMyPhone 5, you can configure a custom passcode for that account so that when a user enters that passcode instead of your own, the tweak will initialize and your device will automatically know to activate the guest mode instead of allowing access to all your apps and data.
The user account that you make can even have its own profile picture, similar to what you’d see when trying to sign in on your Mac or Windows PC. You can see what the preference pane for LendMyPhone 5 looks like below:
In the preference pane above, you can see how LendMyPhone 5 is easily toggled on or off and how new guest user accounts are added. When creating a new guest user account, the following preference pane gives you the ability to choose a name, passcode, and profile picture:
Once you’ve set the account up, you can configure what it will have access to on your device when logged in:
Frankly, it’s embarrassing that Apple hasn’t instituted some sort of guest mode on their iPhones and iPads yet. With the amount of device sharing that goes on in households, in educational facilities, and in workplaces, it seems like this feature would be a commonsense measure to insulate sensitive information from other device users, and it’s strange that Apple hasn’t taken this into account.
Fortunately, the LendMyPhone 5 tweak has, and for many years at that. The latest iteration works with the newer devices running the most recent versions of iOS & iPadOS, including 15 and 16 and on rootless jailbreaks such as Dopamine and palera1n.
If you’re interested in giving LendMyPhone 5 a try for yourself, then you can purchase it for $3.99 from the Geometric Store either by visiting the developer’s website or by accessing the repository in your favorite package manager app.
That repository, for anyone who isn’t already using it, is as follows:
https://apt.geometricsoftware.se/
Are you planning to make use of a guest mode on your jailbroken iPhone or iPad? Be sure to let us know why or why not in the comments section down below.
