Search icon

Tech

04th Mar 2016

VIDEO: This ‘glitch’ that opens your iPhone without a passcode is pretty straight-forward

This had us worried for a moment...

JOE

We’ll be honest, for a good few minutes, we thought this was the real deal.

As the video below shows, there appears to be a way of unlocking your iPhone without using a passcode.

  1. Using a locked phone, simply hold the home button until Siri is activated. 
  2. Ask Siri for the time.
  3. When Siri shows you the time, click on the clock which should bring about four options at the bottom of your screen: World Clock, Alarm, Stopwatch and Timer.
  4. Select Timer.
  5. Click on the ‘When Timer Ends’ option
  6. You’ll then see an option to ‘Buy More Tones’, select that.
  7. As the video below shows, this then opens up the Apple store.
  8. Pressing the home button again brings you to your normal home screen, with no passcode whatsoever entered.

We tried it out and, sure enough, it worked.

But just as we began to hatch plans of sneaking in to our friends’ messages the next time they left their iPhones lying around, we realised that this ‘glitch’ wasn’t actually a glitch at all.

On more recent iPhone models, you can access your phone’s details without using a passcode. When you first received your handset, you’ll more than likely have scanned your thumb print on the home button to make use of the Touch ID option.

In most cases, it’s usually your right thumb that’s used for this. When we tried running through the steps listed above with a different thumb/finger/body part (no, not that body part), we weren’t able to get in.

So rest assured, unless someone hacks of your User ID thumb/finger, the contents of your iPhone should still be safely guarded by a passcode.

LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Conor Sketches | Tiger Woods loves Ger Loughnane and cosplaying as Charles LeClerc 

Topics:

iPhone,security