iPhoney
iPhoney looks like a real phone until somebody taps it.
Hand them your device, or open it fullscreen on theirs, and they get the whole setup. Lock screen. Status bar. Dock. A grid of the apps everybody has: Maps, Photos, Messages, Camera, Settings. It’s built to feel like an actual home screen instead of a cartoon of one. The joke is that nothing behind those icons behaves.
Open Maps and it won’t take you home. It routes you to a bathroom, or it recalculates forever because you missed a turn in 2014. Weather forecasts your mood. Notes rewrites whatever you typed into something meaner. The calculator does math when it feels like it and otherwise says it would rather not. Health treats sitting and napping as elite sports. Wallet has opinions about your six dollar coffee. Photos is a roll of regrettable stills. Settings is a long scroll of Vibe toggles. Music would like you to hold.
Every app looks useful for about a beat. Then it goes sideways.
Camera is where it gets mean. On a real phone or a laptop it uses your actual camera, so the picture is of whatever is sitting in front of it. Then iPhoney stamps a joke on the shot: beauty mode off, a timestamp that’s five minutes slow, a caption your mother would not appreciate. The photo lands in Photos. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere.
It runs in a browser. Nothing to install.
Back in 2008 I put a fart app at number one in the world, so I’ve got some history with dumb things people can’t stop showing their friends.
The gags are fine. The part I like is the two seconds before somebody figures out the phone in their hand is lying to them.
