How To
Essential apps to customize your iPhone without jailbreaking it

- January 31, 2020
- Updated: July 2, 2025 at 4:24 AM


When you open your iPhone or iPad for the first time you can’t help but be impressed. They look amazing and they have a really premium feel in your hand. It’s the same when you turn them on. Everything just works and you can do whatever you need to do smoothly and easily. For some people though, the experience you get straight out of the box just isn’t good enough. Not even on newer iPhone models like the iPhone X, which have the latest version of iOS 13. If you’re one of those people, this guide is for you.
Today we’re going to walk you through all the apps you can download for your iPhone that will give you a unique experience. You won’t need to jailbreak your smartphone neither. These apps are all available on the App Store and offer some great customization options to iPhone users without the need to take any drastic jailbreaking actions or voiding any warranties. Let’s get started.
Home Screen Maker
This is another app that allows you to make big changes to how your iPhone looks and feels. Home Screen Maker lets you make custom home screen layouts for your iPhone and gives you an awful lot of control over your home screen. Whereas Pimp Your Screen gives you some fantastic pre-made options, here you get the chance to build your own. What’s also great though, is that Home Screen Maker also offers plenty of ready-made themes too, which you can get via in-app-purchases.
Icon Skins Builder
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This is a great app that offers something a little different to Home Screen Maker. It brings a new element to the idea of putting your apps on shelves as it gives you 3D shelf options and also gives you the chance to put peripheral items on your shelves that will sit next to your app icons. This is a cool idea that has been well executed.
Magic Screen
We have another great home screen customization app here, but Magic Screen brings something extra to the game as it gives you an extensive toolset for customizing your lock screen too. With Magic Screen you can customize text, draw your own shapes and designs using your finger, and even add widgets such as a calendar widget for keeping on top of things without having to unlock your iPhone.
Ringtones for iPhone

So, now that you’re well versed on customizing how your iPhone looks let’s get into controlling how it sounds. There is no better app for making your own iPhone ringtones and sounds than Ringtones for iPhone. This app has a lot of great features. You can turn any song you have on iTunes into a ringtone and you can even record your voice or a friend’s voice and then convert that into a ringtone too. If you want your iPhone to sound unlike any other iPhone out there, this is the app for you.
Gboard
Gboard is a fantastic keyboard option for iPhone that gives you the default keyboard Android users get on their phones. It includes cool options like drag typing, which allow you to type words out by dragging your finger across the letters of the word rather than tapping them individually. This offers a whole new element to your Apple iPhone that will make your iOS device feel completely different to other iPhones.
SwiftKey

SwiftKey was the original app that introduced drag typing before Google also incorporated it into Gboard. As well as offering this new way of typing, however, SwiftKey also gives you lots of different style options for your keyboard including colors and fonts for the letter keys. As the keyboard actually takes up quite a lot of space on your screen, this offers you an extra element of control over the aesthetics of your device.
Wrapping up
So, there we’ve been through quite a lot of different customization options for your iPhone. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t give you quite as many customization options as you’ll find on Android but there’s still plenty for you to look into. Since iOS 11 there have been more options becoming available like GIF keyboard shortcuts, party keyboards, and a dark mode but the truth remains that Android has many more customization options.
Patrick Devaney is a news reporter for Softonic, keeping readers up to date on everything affecting their favorite apps and programs. His beat includes social media apps and sites like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat. Patrick also covers antivirus and security issues, web browsers, the full Google suite of apps and programs, and operating systems like Windows, iOS, and Android.
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