20 iPhone Annoyances and How To Fix Them

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some iPhone annoyances and how to make them stop.

Everyone has those little things that kind of annoy them about their iPhone. But often these are simple to stop. Sometimes it is just as easy as changing a setting. For instance, when you're typing, say in an app like Notes, you'll hear these little tick sounds every time you tap a key on the virtual keyboard. These don't have to be there. You can actually just turn them off. All you need to do is go into the Settings App. Then go to General. Then look for Keyboard. Go into there and there's a setting for Sound. If you turn that Off you won't get the sound anymore. You can also turn On and Off Haptic feedback. That's a slight vibration every time you touch a key. So now when you type, it is completely silent. 

Now another problem people run into when typing is it is too easy to hit this little button here at the bottom right. That starts Dictation and then it is going to take down every word you say until you turn it off. But you can simply get rid of that button if you never use dictation and find it annoying that you sometimes accidentally trigger it. Once again go back into Settings and return to General and then Keyboard. Scroll down to Enable Dictation. Turn that Off and now when you look at the keyboard you'll find that button is gone. 

Another problem comes up when Autocorrect gets something wrong. Maybe there's something that you commonly mistype, like hitting a letter like that and you can tell  it autocorrects there when you would have wanted to Autocorrect to this. If you find that this has been plaguing you for some time you can go back into Settings, Keyboard and here there's Text Replacement. This is kind of a nuclear option to really force Auto-Correct to work the way you want with a specific word. So I'm going to hit the Plus button here and the shortcut is what you mistype. So I'll set it up like this and then the phrase here is what replaces it. Once you have that set then you'll never get that particular problem ever again as Text Replacement take precedence over autocorrect. 

Now a common problem a lot of us have is we get too many Notifications on our phone. It is easy to install a few apps. Each of those gives you a notification and suddenly you're just inundated with notifications all the time. To get that under control go into Settings and then look for Notifications. Now you have some basic defaults here. But what you're going to want to do is go down to list of all of your apps here. It is going to list everyone that sends you a notification. Then go into the notifications for that app. If you don't want to get notifications at all from it you can simply turn it Off here. If you do want to get some notifications but you really want to control how and when you get them then look at the rest of the options that the app offers. It will pay off big time to just spend 5 or 10 minutes going through your list and customizing your notifications. 

Also while you are here you can solve another annoyance. That's badges. Badges are those little numbers you'll see on your Home Screen, like this 1 above the Reminders icon. You may have these numbers for tons of your apps. Not only are they annoying but if you have too many of them they become kind of useless as you are blind to them. But if you continue to look in each of those notification settings here you'll find Badges as a switch. You can simply turn that off for any app and you won't see that little red number on the icon. Just leave it on for the apps that are important to you. 

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Now another type of annoyance is when things get crowded and messy. Like, for instance, when you have way too many apps across all of your Home Screens. There are people who have 5, 10, 15 different Home Screens filled with app icons. It becomes impossible to find anything and most of those apps are things you don't normally go to. You can remove any app that you want from your Home Screen without deleting it from your iPhone. To do that simply tap and hold and then do Remove App. Now it is a little scary because it sounds like you're going to actually remove the app from your iPhone. But you'll see on the next screen you can simply select Remove From Home Screen. When you do that it's gone from there but the app is still there. You can swipe down the middle like that and Search For the app and run it that way or just swipe all the way to the end here to your App Library and search in here for that app or find it as one of the icons in this list. If you just tap in here you'll actually get an alphabetical list of all of your apps. 

Now if you are one of those people with say 15 pages or more of apps on your Home Screen you can get rid of an entire page or actually just Hide it by tapping and holding on a blank area. So now you bring up the Edit button. Then you can Edit, Pages. Now you see all the pages of your Home Screen. Simply uncheck one, like that, and Done and now that page is no longer there. It's missing but you can easily bring it back by going to Edit, Edit Page again, and adding it back. If you really want to get fancy you can go into Settings and then go to Focus. For each Focus Mode you can customize which Home Screens are present in that Focus Mode. Then you just switch between Focus Modes and different pages of your Home Screen will be there. So you can have a whole page of apps hidden during the day that's there in the evening and vice versa. 

Now speaking of things tiling up way too much a lot of us have a Messages App that is filled with conversations and the messages in those conversations go back for years. But you can get that under control by going into Settings and then Apps. Then looking for Messages. Go in here and you have the ability to have Messages automatically delete after a period of time. So you can set it for when each message becomes more than 30 days old it can automatically delete. Even just setting it to a year old would clean up the Messages app for a lot of people. Of course if you are one of those people who wants to have this message history that is never removed you don't want to use this. But if you're like me and don't really care about the old messages then this is ideal for keeping your Messages app under control.

Now another place that things get cluttered is in Safari with Tabs. A lot of us just keep opening up tabs all day long and if you go and look at your Tabs you can have tons of different ones here. You can, of course, get rid of any one by just tapping on the little x at the upper right hand corner of any of these. But if you tap and hold on any one of these you'll notice that one of the options you've got is to close other tabs. So, keep this tab open but get rid of all the rest. But there's also a setting for that. If you go into Settings and then Apps and then you go down to Safari look further down in here and you'll see Close Tabs and you can set this for After One Day, Week, or Month. You still have your history to fall back on. So I've actually got mine set to after one day. So my tabs are always relatively clean and if I need something from yesterday I just look in my Safari History for it. 

Now annoyances aren't brought on by something you're doing but they just happen automatically. You can turn those automatic functions Off if you look in Settings in the right place. For instance, if you go into WiFi you can scroll down to Auto Join Hotspot Here. Select that and this is what determines whether or not you automatically join a network you've been on before. If you have it set to Never then you have to manually join the network. It still remembers the network and it is easy enough to use the WiFi in the cafe or meeting room or whatever. You just have to choose that in your WiFi settings. You can have it set to Ask To Join so it will prompt you which can be annoying. You can have it be automatic. It automatically joins the network whether you want to or not as soon as it detects that that's the local WiFi network. 

Now if you have an iPad as well as an iPhone one of the things you may find annoying is that if you buy or download a free app on your iPad it shows up on your iPhone and vice versa. But you can disable that. If you go down to Apps in Settings here and then you go to App Store Settings you'll find this item here, App Downloads. If it is turned On buying an app on one device automatically puts it on the other as well. So you can turn it Off if you want to manually have to add it. Remember purchasing on your Apple Account means you can download it on all your devices. So you don't have to pay for it twice. You just can avoid automatically adding it to all your devices when you purchase it on one by turning this Off. 

Another automatic thing that some people complain about is how Brightness will change on your iPhone. You go into Display & Brightness here you'll find your settings here for screen brightness. You'll have automatic settings depending upon your iPhone model. For instance, this one here has True Tone. I can turn that Off. Also note you can have automatic set for Appearance. It will automatically change between light and dark depending upon the time of day. So you may want to have that turned Off as well. 

Now if you have ever experienced the annoying problem of getting into a car with your AirPods and then having the audio suddenly go to the car instead of your AirPods, well you have the ability to turn it Off and make sure the sound stays with your AirPods. So go into the General Settings here and then go to AirPlay & Continuity. Here you've got a setting for Keep Audio With Headphones. So turn that On and you'll have to manually change the audio to go to the car. It won't do it automatically. It will stay with your headphones or AirPods. 

Now here are some annoyances that happen when you are doing something in your iPhone and there's an unexpected result. For instance, what if you were to change the volume on your iPhone and then find that because you have lowered the volume you don't hear the phone ring or the alarm go off. You can correct that by going into the Sound & Haptics part of Settings, right here, and then look for Change with Buttons under Ringtones & Alerts. If you've got that turned On then using the side buttons will change the volume of the ringtones and alerts. If you have it turned Off then using the side buttons will change the volume of the App you're using, like the Music App or Game you're playing, but won't mess with the ringtone and alert volume. 

Now if you've ever tried to use an iPhone while lying down, like on sofa or in bed and you get a situation where your iPhone is kind of on its side but so is your head. You don't want it to change orientation but it does. You can turn that Off. The easiest way to do that is in Control Center look for this symbol here. This turns on the Orientation Lock. So now if you turn your iPhone  horizontal it will stay vertical and vice versa. It is easy to turn it On and Off here in Control Center. If you don't see this in Control Center just tap and hold in a blank area, add a control, and search for orientation to come up with that control and add it. 

Now what comes to mind for a lot of people when thinking of iPhones and annoying is Siri, especially when Siri triggers itself when you don't want it to, like it did just there. But if you go into Settings and look for Siri, in my case on this phone it's Apple Intelligence & Siri but it might be different on yours. Go in here you can change how Siri is activated. Look for Talk & Type to Siri here and you'll see the different trigger phrases and you can simply turn it Off so it isn't triggered by your voice anymore. Or if you pressing the side button to bring up Siri is something you accidentally do you can turn this Off as well. If you find it annoying to have to talk to Siri, especially if you're in public with other people around, then turn on Type To Siri. That way when you trigger Siri you actually are typing your request instead of having to speak it. 

Now Control Center is super handy. When you drag from the top right you get all these controls and you can customize what's there. It is a great feature of the iPhone. But sometimes it can get in the way, Like if you're playing a game sometimes there is an action that involves that corner and you accidentally trigger Control Center. Go into Settings and then Control Center. Then where it says Access Within Apps turn that Off. Now you can get to Control Center but only from the Home Screen. 

One thing people are finding annoying in Mail is the new Categories feature. Some people love it but others find it confusing that they are looking at their Inbox and they may not see everything that's in their Inbox until they look at some of these other categories. So you can turn this Off one of two ways. First is just select All Mail to the right here. That shows you everything like you're not using Categories. But also tap the three dots button here and then choose List View and now Categories is turned Off. 

So the Camera App can be annoying if it doesn't behave the way you want it to. For instance if you turn on Live Photos in the Camera App and capture a photo, then you might be stuck capturing Live Photos again and again until you remember to turn it Off. You may like it that way. You may want that switch to be On until you turn it Off. Or you may like it to actually always go to a Default every time you start the Camera. You have control of this. In Settings go to Camera. Then look for Preserve Settings. Then you get a whole bunch of switches here that you could turn On or Off. It will remember your last setting when you go back into the Camera App. If you've got it turned On and if you turn it Off it will go back to the Default the next time you go into the Camera App. 

Now one last one. When you go to the Maps App it can be annoying it doesn't get an address right particularly if you ask it to go home or go to work and it goes to the wrong address, or maybe just gets the address slightly wrong. Like the front of a building instead of the back of the building. So in the Maps App tap here at the bottom at that line right above the Search Box. You'll find under Places a variety of different places here. You probably see Home taken from your contacts. Also you probably see work or if not it may have a little button here where it says add underneath and you can add it. But if it is not getting it right you can tap here and hold then Edit Details. You can change the address of the place and you can even go down to Refine Location on the map and specify a specific spot instead of letting it use say the front door for whatever address that is to give you directions. 

If there's one thing to take away from this video is that if something is annoying you on your iPhone or not working quite the way you want you may be able to change it by finding just the right setting. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.