If you love your iPhone but hate the San Francisco font, developer Zhuowei Zhang has posted a nifty tool on Github: an app that can temporarily “overwrite” the iOS system font with another, giving your phone a new one. , not Apple-approved Look.
The app doesn’t require jailbreak of any kind, but it does require “iOS 16.1.2 or lower” to work, as it relies on a kernel execution bug (CVE-2022-46689) that was patched in iOS 16.2. If you’ve already installed iOS 16.2, which we recommend you do for security reasons, you won’t be able to experiment with the hack. All font changes are undone by rebooting the device, and apps that don’t use the default San Francisco font won’t change.
The app includes a number of pre-installed fonts, many of which appear to be designed to irritate the eyes of Apple’s UI designers. Comic Sans MS leads the charge in that regard, but Segoe UI (the default font of choice of Windows and Microsoft) and Samsung’s “Choco Cooky” (a distant cousin of Comic Sans) are also included. Custom fonts can be installed as long as they are iOS compatible.
Apple used to support more extensive customization of its user interfaces in the classic Mac OS days, when everything from system fonts to window borders could be customized using the Appearance Manager. Those settings disappeared in the early releases of Mac OS X, and changing the look and feel of each of Apple’s operating systems has only become more difficult in recent years as Apple has taken more and more steps to protect system files from being modified and sabotage (benign and otherwise).
Designing your interfaces around a single, predictable font makes it easier to test things and harder for users to break things by using a bizarre monospaced font that causes rendering errors. But these screenshots make me wish OS designers would leave that to me like they used to.
List image by Apple
