Set it and forget it? 5 iPhone Settings You Should Check Right Now

Year after year, Apple releases new features and settings for their iPhones, adding more customization options that change the way we use our phones.

The start of a new year is a good time to review those settings. Do you really need notifications from that particular app? Want to revoke location access from a certain person? Please take a few minutes to read these settings carefully and make sure you get the most out of your iPhone.

1. Reset individual settings

(Credit: Tyler Hayes/Apple)

Ready to start over? if a factory reset is too drastic, you can manually select the settings that need an update. Go to Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Reset. Faucet Reset all settings to update your iPhone’s network settings, keyboard dictionary, location settings, privacy settings, and Apple Pay cards, all in one go, without deleting your photos, contacts, or other data and media. Or update them one by one.

• Do you have connectivity problems? Choose reset network settings to delete previously used networks and VPN (which were not installed using a configuration profile).

• If there is a problem with the design of your phone, try Reset home screen layout to get back Apple Embedded Apps to the home screen, as if they were in a new phone Outside the Box.

• Every time you touch a word or spelling that your phone doesn’t know, it makes a note of it and saves the information to its dictionary. If something goes wrong, try Reset keyboard dictionary to clear all the words you’ve added and reset the suggested words you see as you type.

• Revoke location access for people or apps, touch Reset location and privacy to restore those settings to their default values. (For people, this can also be managed from the find my app.) When you reopen apps that used your location, like Uber or google mapsthey may ask you to grant them access to your location again.

2. Enable Security Check

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In iOS 16apple added security verification as a way to quickly disconnect from people and apps that may be tracking you, with or without your knowledge. In the case of domestic abuse or other harmful situations, this feature can help restore control of the iPhone to its owner.

It may also help to review the sharing settings you’ve made in the past and forgot to disconnect from anyone who may still have access to your content, location, or settings.

To review the people and apps you share information with, go to Settings > Privacy and security and scroll down to security verification. Faucet Manage sharing and access to see your current settings and decide if you want to change something or not.

3. Pin notifications

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If there are some apps that don’t notify you when you think they should, there’s no single solution to fix that setting. Instead, you’ll have to change things manually for individual apps. Opened Settings > Notifications to find a list of all the apps on your phone. Choose summary scheduled to see if any apps have been configured to send notifications at a specific time.

You can also inspect an individual application. Notifications for an application can be enabled or disabled from the Enable notifications switch at the top of the screen. You can also decide whether the app notifies you on the lock screen, notification center, and whether it uses banners.

By scrolling to the bottom of the Notifications section, you can turn AMBER Alerts, Emergency Alerts, and Public Safety Alerts off or back on.

4. Change focus modes

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For those who need a temporary respite from notifications, Apple introduced Focus modes in iOS 15 and improved in iOS 16to limit phone calls, text messages or other interruptions.

It’s easy to overdo it a bit here. Are you missing messages? Maybe your iPhone says it’s in Do Not Disturb mode because you enabled it on your iPad? Check what approaches you have configured in Settings > Focus. See if you want Focus to sync between devices and if certain apps have permission to share if you have muted notifications.

5. Check accessibility options

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Some of the coolest features of the iPhone are its accessibility settings. touch back function, for example, performs an action when you touch the back of the device.

If you’ve tweaked some of these features over the years and forgotten about them, your phone may be acting unexpectedly. Personally, I thought my iPhone was possessed because I set it to open the app switcher when I tapped the back three times and was activating it by accident.

To revisit this setting, open Settings > Accessibility. Scroll through the different options to see if anything has changed that you need to reset. Some of these options can be buried; you need to open Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Touch back to change the Back Tap setting, for example.

Hands on with the Apple iPhone 14 Pro line