The 5 best pranks to play on anyone with an iPhone
Do you feel like having some fun at the expense of your iPhone-toting friends? There are a number of nasty things you can do to anyone with a mobile phone -- switching contact numbers, for example -- but there are a few special tricks you can pull on those with the iPhone, and here are the best of the best.
Note: These tricks apply to iOS 7, so if your friend is still stuck on iOS 6 or earlier, you're out of luck.
Auto incorrect
This one has been around for a while, but it's still one of the most confusing for people who don't know about the iPhone's auto-shortcut feature.
Grab the victims phone (preferably without them knowing) and head to the settings page. From here, go to "General" and then "Keyboard," and find the "Shortcuts" menu. Here you can manipulate your friend's text input to do pretty much whatever you want.
You can set any single word to automatically change into another word or even an entire phrase. You can make some mild tweaks like changing "are" to correct to "our" and "there" to "they're," which will simply make your friend appear as though they never passed fifth grade English class, or you can get a bit more brutal...
The old switcheroo
This is one of the easiest to pull off and it takes just a few seconds.
Under the Accessibility menu, invert the phone's colors and then back out to the home screen. Believe it or not, there are plenty of iPhone owners who don't even know that this feature exists, which will lead to a whole lot of confusion once they try to use their phone.
Unclickable icons
You're going to need at least a minute or two with the victim's phone for this, so make sure you won't get caught before you begin.
Start by taking a screenshot of the user's home screen (home button + lock button). Then, hide all but one of the user's home page icons on another page or in a folder and tuck it away somewhere that it won't be seen unless searched for. Keep the top-left icon in place, or else the phone may push all the icons from the next page onto the home screen, which will ruin things.
Now, set that home page screenshot as the home screen wallpaper. Ta-da! You've now made a home screen populated by unclickable icons!
Note: If the user has the parallax 3D effect enabled, they might figure it out sooner than usual, but you should still get at least a few laughs out of it.
The never-ending text
This is a great trick you can play on an iPhone owner without ever needing to touch their smartphone.
There's nothing that boosts an iPhone user's anticipation like the "your chat partner is typing" animation during an instant message conversation. The evil geniuses at Miscellaneous Mischief ripped that animation from the messaging app and created an animated gif out of it. Now you can send the image to your iPhone-owning friends and watch their frustration build as your "message" never comes through. Evil and easy; a perfect combination!
Lock them in!
This one requires access to the user's device and a few minutes of your time as well, but the results will definitely be worth it.
First, go into the Accessibility menu and turn on Guided Access. Now go into whatever app you want to lock the victim into. Triple-click the home button to enable Guided Access, which will prevent the user from stopping the app or backing out to the home screen. The phone will prompt you for a passcode as well, so only you will be able to free your friend's phone from the app you have chosen.
Want to really mess things up? Open a music app like Spotify, crank the volume all the way up, press play, then use Guided Access to block the areas of the screen that control the tunes. Now after you lock the app, there is no way to turn off the music. The phone won't respond to being put in silent mode or the volume controls on the side, and it also can't be turned off with the power button. Try this in a public place like a restaurant to really cause a scene.
Or, you can just use the screen-blocking feature to write a cheeky message on the screen.
[Header image credit: Siraf72]
