Chapter 20. Settings

The Settings app is like the Control Panel in Windows or System Preferences on the Mac. It houses hundreds of settings for every aspect of the iPhone and its apps.

Almost everything in the list of Settings is a doorway to another screen, where you make the actual changes.

Tip

Settings has a search box at the top! You don’t need a photographic memory (or this chapter) to find which screen holds a certain setting you’re looking for.

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In this book, you can read about the iPhone’s preference settings in the appropriate spots—wherever they’re relevant. And the Control Center, of course, is designed to eliminate trips into Settings.

But so you’ll have it all in one place, here’s an item-by-item walk-through of the Settings app and its structure in iOS 10.

Three Important Settings Tricks

The Settings app is many screens deep. You might “drill down” by tapping, for example, General, then Keyboard, and then Text Replacement. It’s a lot of tapping, a lot of navigation.

Fortunately, you have three kinds of shortcuts.

First, you can jump directly to a particular Settings screen—from within any app—using Siri (Chapter 6). You can say, for example, “Open Sound settings,” “Open Brightness settings,” “Open Notification settings,” “Open Wi-Fi settings,” and so on. Siri promptly takes you to the corresponding screen—no tapping required.

Second, you can jump directly to the four most frequently adjusted panels—Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Cellular, and Battery—by hard-pressing the Settings app icon on the Home screen (6s and 7 models). The shortcut menu offers direct access to those panes.

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Finally, on any model, you can swipe to go back. Once you’ve drilled down to, say, General→Keyboard→Text Replacement, you can “drill up” again by swiping across the screen to the right. (Start from the edge of the screen.)

Airplane Mode

As you’re probably aware, you’re not allowed to make cellphone calls on U.S. airplanes. According to legend (if not science), a cellphone’s radio can interfere with a plane’s navigation equipment.

But the iPhone does a lot more than make calls. Are you supposed to deprive yourself of all the music, videos, movies, and email that you could be using in flight, just because calling is forbidden?

Nope. Just turn on airplane mode by tapping the switch at the top of the Settings list (so the switch background turns green). The word Cellular dims there in Settings (you’ve turned off your cellular circuitry); but the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth switches are still available, though turned off—meaning that you’re now welcome to switch them back on, even in airplane mode.

Now it’s safe (and permitted) to use the iPhone in flight, even with Wi-Fi on, because its cellular features are turned off completely. You can’t make calls, but you can do anything else in the iPhone’s bag of tricks.

Tip

Turning airplane mode on and off is faster if you use the Control Center (Control Center) or Siri (“Turn on airplane mode”). Same for Wi-Fi, described next.

Wi-Fi

This item in Settings opens the Wi-Fi Networks screen, where you’ll find three useful controls:

Bluetooth

Here’s the on/off switch for the iPhone’s Bluetooth transmitter, which is required to communicate with a Bluetooth fitness band, earpiece, keyboard, or hands-free system in a car. When you turn the switch on, you’re offered the chance to pair the iPhone with other Bluetooth equipment; the paired gadgets are listed here for ease of connecting and disconnecting.

Tip

The Control Center (Control Center) has a Bluetooth button. It’s faster to use that than to visit Settings.

Carrier

If you see this panel at all, you’re doubly lucky: First, you’re enjoying a trip overseas; second, you have a choice of cellphone carriers who have roaming agreements with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint. Tap your favorite and prepare to pay some serious roaming fees.

Cellular

These days, not many cellphone plans let you use the Internet as much as you want; most have monthly limits. For example, your $50 a month might include 2 gigabytes of Internet data use.

Most of the settings on this screen are meant to help you control how much Internet data your phone uses.

Personal Hotspot

Once you’ve turned this feature on (Personal Hotspot (Tethering)) in Cellular, this switch appears here, too—on the main Settings screen for your convenience.

Notifications

This panel lists all the apps that think they have the right to nag for your attention. Flight-tracking programs alert you that there’s an hour before takeoff. Social-networking programs ping you when someone’s trying to reach you. Instant-messaging apps ding to let you know that you have a new message. It can add up to a lot of interruption.

On this panel, you can tailor, to an almost ridiculous degree, how you want to be nagged. See Notifications for a complete description.

Control Center

The Control Center is written up in Control Center. There are two settings to change here. If you turn off Access on Lock Screen, then the Control Center isn’t available on the phone’s Lock screen. No passing prankster can change your phone’s settings without your password.

And if you turn off Access Within Apps, then you won’t land in the Control Center by accident when you’re playing some game that involves a lot of swiping.

Do Not Disturb

This is one of iOS’s most brilliant and useful features. See Remind Me Later.

General

The General pages offer a huge, motley assortment of settings governing the behavior of the virtual keyboard, the Spotlight search feature, and about 6 trillion other things (facing page, left).

Note

This feature takes awhile to complete—and that’s a good thing. The iPhone doesn’t just delete your data; it also overwrites the newly erased memory with gibberish to make sure the bad guys can’t see any of your deleted info, even with special hacking tools.

Reset Network Settings makes the iPhone forget all the memorized Wi-Fi networks it currently autorecognizes.

Reset Keyboard Dictionary has to do with the iPhone’s autocorrection feature, which kicks in whenever you’re trying to input text. Ordinarily, every time you type something the iPhone doesn’t recognize—some name or foreign word, for example—and you don’t accept the iPhone’s suggestion, it adds the word you typed to its dictionary so it doesn’t bother you with a suggestion again the next time. If you think you’ve entered too many misspellings into it, you can delete from its little brain all the new “words” you’ve taught it.

Reset Home Screen Layout undoes any icon moving you’ve done on the Home screen. It also consolidates your Home screen icons, fitting them onto as few screens as possible.

Finally, Reset Location & Privacy refers to the “OK to use location services?” warning that appears whenever an iPhone program, like Maps or Camera, tries to figure out where you are. This button makes the iPhone forget all your responses to those permission boxes. In other words, you’ll be asked for permission all over again the next time you use each of those programs.

Display & Brightness

Ordinarily, the iPhone controls its own screen brightness. An ambient-light sensor hidden behind the glass at the top of the iPhone’s face samples the room brightness each time you wake the phone and adjusts the screen: brighter in bright rooms, dimmer in darker ones.

When you prefer more manual control, here’s what you can do:

Wallpaper

Wallpaper can mean either the photo on the Lock screen (what you see when you wake the iPhone up), or the background picture on your Home screen. On this panel, you can change the image used for either one.

It shows miniatures of the two places you can install wallpaper—the Lock screen and the Home screen. Each shows what you’ve got installed there as wallpaper at the moment.

Tip

You can tap either screen miniature to open a Set screen, where you can adjust the current photo’s size and positioning.

When you tap Choose a New Wallpaper, you’re shown a list of photo sources you can use as backgrounds. At the top, you get three categories worth noticing.

Tip

You can install your own Live Photos as Lock-screen backgrounds. They, too, will play their little 3-second loops when you hard-press the Lock screen.

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Scroll down a little, and you’ll find your own photos, nestled in categories like All Photos, Favorites, Selfies, My Panoramas, and so on, as shown above at left.

All these pictures show up as thumbnail miniatures; tap one to see what it looks like at full size.

Tip

Complicated, “busy” photos make it harder to read icons and icon names on the Home screen.

Once you’ve spotted a worthy wallpaper—in any of the flavors described already—tap it. You’re offered a choice of two installation methods: Still, which is what you’d expect, and Perspective, which means that the photo will shift slightly when you tilt the phone, as though it’s several inches under the glass. (If you’ve chosen a Live Photo, you’ll see a third choice, Live Photo, meaning that it will “play” when it’s on the Lock screen and you hard-press the glass.)

Finally, tap Set. Now the iPhone wants to know which of the two places you want to use this wallpaper; tap Set Lock Screen, Set Home Screen, or Set Both (if you want the same picture in both places).

Sounds (or Sounds & Haptics)

Here’s a more traditional cellphone-settings screen: the place where you choose a ringtone sound for incoming calls.

Meet Haptics

If you have an iPhone 7, there’s one more switch at the very bottom: System Haptics. Haptics are the tiny, click-like vibrations that Apple has scattered throughout iOS to accentuate the animations that make the iPhone fun to use.

These little bumps mark the maximum positions for things like pinch zooming, sliders, and panels that slide onto the screen (Control Center, Spotlight search, Notification Center). You’ll also feel these clicks when you spin the “dials” that specify times and dates (in Calendar, Clock, and so on), when you turn a Settings switch on or off, when your icons start wiggling on the Home screen (The Home Screen), and when you send or receive iMessage screen effects like lasers and fireworks (The Finger-Sketch Pad).

Haptics are subtle but effective—but if you disagree, here’s where you turn them off.

Siri

Here’s the master on/off switch for Siri, and the on/off switch for the hands-free “Hey Siri” feature. Both are described in Chapter 6.

Also on this panel: a choice of languages; a choice of speaking voices (including both male and female voices—and a choice of accents, like American, British, or Australian); an option to have Siri’s responses read aloud only when you’re on a headset (so you don’t disturb those around you); and an option to choose your own Contacts card, so Siri knows, for example, where to go when you say, “Give me directions home.”

Touch ID & Passcode

Here’s where you set up a password for your phone, or (if you have an iPhone 5s or later) where you teach the phone to recognize your fingerprints. Full details start in Fingerprint Security (Touch ID).

Battery

This panel offers these goodies:

Privacy

By “privacy,” Apple means “the ability of apps and Apple to access your data.”

Many an app works better, or claims to, when it has access to your address book, calendar, photos, and so on. Generally, when you run such an app for the first time, it explicitly asks you for permission to access each kind of data. But here, on this panel, you have a central dashboard—and on/off switches—for each data type and the apps that want it.

Suppose, for example, that you tap Location Services. At the top of the next screen, you’ll find the master on/off switch for all Location Services. If you turn it off, then the iPhone can no longer determine where you are on a map, geotag your photos, find the closest ATM, tell your friends where you’re hanging out, and so on. Below this master switch, you’ll find these options:

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This list (on the main Privacy screen) identifies the kinds of data that your apps might wish to access; we’re going way beyond location here. For example, your apps might want to access your address book or your calendar.

Tap a category—Contacts, for example—to see a list of the apps that are merrily tapping into its data. And to see the on/off switch, which you can use to block that app’s access.

Similarly, new apps you download may sometimes want access to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Lots of apps, for example, harness your Facebook account for the purpose of logging in or finding friends to play games with. Tap Twitter or Facebook to see which apps are using your account information.

Do you give Apple permission to collect information about how you’re using your phone and how well the phone is behaving each day? On this screen, you can choose Don’t Send or Automatically Send. If you tap Diagnostic & Usage Data, then you can see the actual data the phone intends to send. (Hint: It’s programmery gibberish.)

Share With App Developers gives the phone permission to send non-Apple app writers the details of any crashes you experience while using their apps, so that, presumably, they can get busy analyzing and fixing the bugs. Improve Activity and Improve Wheelchair Mode share your activity and (if you have an Apple Watch) wheelchair-motion data with Apple, for similar reasons. Deciding whether to share this data all boils down to where you land on the great paranoia-to-generosity scale.

The final Privacy option gives you a Limit Ad Tracking switch. Turning it on won’t affect how many ads you see within your apps—but it will prevent advertisers from delivering ads based on your interests. You’ll just get generic ads.

There’s a Reset Advertising Identifier button here, too. You may not realize that, behind the scenes, you have an Ad Identifier number. It’s “a non-permanent, non-personal device identifier” that advertisers can associate with you and your habits—the things you buy, the apps you use, and so on. That way, advertisers can insert ads into your apps that pertain to your interests—without ever knowing your name.

But suppose you’ve been getting a lot of ads that seem to mischaracterize your interests. Maybe you’re a shepherd, and you keep seeing ads for hyperviolent games. Or maybe you’re a nun, and you keep getting ads for marital aids.

In those cases, you might want to reset your Ad ID with this button, thus starting from scratch as a brand-new person about whom the advertisers know nothing.

iCloud

Here’s where you enter your iCloud name and password—and where you find the on/off switches for the various kinds of data synchronization that iCloud can perform for you. Chapter 17 tells all.

iTunes & App Store

If you’ve indulged in a few downloads (or a few hundred) from the App Store or iTunes music store, then you may well find some settings of use here. For example, when you tap your Apple ID at the top of the panel, you get these buttons:

If you have an iCloud account, then a very convenient option is available to you: automatic downloads of music, apps, and ebooks you’ve bought on other iOS gadgets. For example, if you buy a new album on your iPad, then turning on Music here means that your iPhone will download the same album automatically next time it’s in a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Updates means that if you accept an updated version of an app on one of your other Apple gadgets, it will be auto-updated on this phone, too.

Those downloads are, however, big. They can eat up your cellphone’s monthly data allotment right quick and send you deep into Surcharge Land. That’s why the iPhone does that automatic downloading only when you’re in a Wi-Fi hotspot—unless you turn on Use Cellular Data. Hope you know what you’re doing.

Wallet & Apple Pay

This panel, available on the iPhone 6 and later, sets all the preferences for Apple Pay (Apple Pay). You see any credit cards you’ve enrolled, plus Add Credit or Debit Card to enroll another.

Double-Click Home Button is the on/off switch for one of the ways to use Apple Pay—the method by which you can prepare the phone for payment before approaching the wireless cashier terminal, as described in The Setup.

Allow Payments on Mac is the on/off switch for the option to use your iPhone’s fingerprint reader to approve purchases you make on the web using your Mac (an option on sites that offer Apple Pay online). Finally, Transaction Defaults sets up the card, address, email account, and phone number you prefer to use when buying stuff online.

Mail

Here you set up your email account information, specify how often you want the iPhone to check for new messages, how you want your Mail app to look, and more. (Yes, in iOS 10, Apple finally broke up the unwieldy Mail, Contacts, Calendars settings page into three separate ones.)

Accounts

Your email accounts are listed here; this is also where you set up new ones. Chapter 15 covers most of the options here, but one important item is worth noting: Fetch New Data.

The beauty of “push” email is that new email appears on your phone immediately after it was sent. You get push email if you have, for example, a Yahoo Mail account, iCloud account (Chapter 17), or Microsoft Exchange account (Chapter 19).

Having an iPhone that’s updated with these critical life details in real time is amazingly useful, but there are several reasons why you might want to turn off the Push feature. You’ll save battery power, save money when you’re traveling abroad (where every “roaming” Internet use can run up your cellular bill), and avoid the constant “new mail” jingle when you’re trying to concentrate.

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And what if you don’t have a push email service, or if you turn it off? In that case, your iPhone can still do a pretty decent job of keeping you up to date. It can check your email every 15 minutes, every half-hour, every hour, or only on command (Manually). That’s the decision you make in the Fetch New Data panel. (Keep in mind that more frequent checking means shorter battery life.)

Tip

The iPhone always checks email each time you open the Mail app, regardless of your setting here. If you have a push service like iCloud or Exchange, it also checks for changes to your schedule or address book each time you open Calendar or Contacts—again, no matter what your setting here.

Contacts

Contacts gets its own little set of options in Settings:

Calendar

Your iPhone’s calendar can be updated by remote control, wirelessly, through the air, either by your company (via Exchange, Chapter 19) or by somebody at home using your computer (via iCloud, Chapter 17).

Notes

Notes can sync with various online services: iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, and so on. Tap Accounts here to specify which ones should show up in the Notes app; tap Default Account to indicate which account you use mainly—the one that should contain any new note.

And now that Notes comes with ready-to-use type styles like Title, Heading, and Body, you can also use the New Notes Start With option here to choose which of those is the first line when you create a new note. If you usually start with a title for your note “card,” then choose Title, for example.

Password is the command center for the new locked notes feature (Locking Notes). You can change your password here, or create an additional one—or allow your fingerprint to unlock your locked notes.

You can take photos right from within Notes. If you turn on Save Media to Photos, then you’ll also get a copy of those shots in your Photos app, just as though you’d taken them with the Camera app.

Finally: Most people use Notes with online accounts like iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, and so on, so that their notes are always backed up and synced to their computers. But if you turn on On My iPhone here, then you’ll have another option: Creating notes that live only on your phone, and aren’t transmitted, synced, or backed up. Handy if you have deeply personal information, or you just don’t trust those online services.

Reminders

Hey, it’s the preference settings for the Reminders app!

Phone

These settings have to do with your address book, call management, and other phone-related preferences.

Tip

The button at the bottom of the screen opens your account page on the web, for further details on your cellphone billing and features.

Messages

These options govern text messages (SMS) and iMessages, both of which are described in Chapter 7:

FaceTime

These options pertain to FaceTime, the video calling feature described in FaceTime Video Calls. Here, for example, is the on/off switch for the entire feature; a place to enter your Apple ID, so people can make FaceTime calls to you; and a place to enter email addresses and a phone number, which can also be used to reach you.

The Caller ID section lets you specify how you want to be identified when you place a call to somebody else: either as a phone number or an email address.

Finally, here yet again is the Blocked option—a third way to edit the list of people you don’t want to hear from.

Maps

The expanded Maps app has an expanded set of settings:

Compass

You wouldn’t think that something as simple as the Compass app would need a Settings page, but here it is: an on/off switch called Use True North. (True north is the “top” point of the Earth’s rotational axis. If you turn it off, then Compass uses magnetic north, the spot traditional compasses point to; it’s about 11 degrees away from true north).

Safari

Here’s everything you ever wanted to adjust in the web browser but didn’t know how to ask.

Search

General

Privacy & Security

News

Extensions describes the News app. Here’s where you indicate whether it’s allowed to tailor your news to your Location, whether it can bug you with Notifications about news stories, whether it’s allowed to fetch news in the Background (at some cost to battery life), and whether it can fetch new news over the Cellular Data network (at some cost to your data allowance).

And you can turn off the Story Previews (where the first couple of lines of each news story appear right in the app).

Music

What you see here depends on whether you’ve subscribed to the $10-a-month Apple Music service (Chapter 9).

  • Show Apple Music. When this is off, the new tabs (For You and New) disappear from the Music app. Which makes sense if you’re not a subscriber, since they’re doing you no good.

  • Genius. This control doesn’t actually do anything, since as of iOS 10.2, the old Genius song-suggestion feature no longer exists. Oopsie!

  • iCloud Music Library (which appears only if you use Apple Music) is described in The Library Tab.

  • Show Star Ratings. Turn this on if you’d like to rate the songs in your music collection from one to five stars. Note that this option doesn’t appear until you’ve rated at least one song, either by clicking in iTunes (on your computer) or by telling Siri, “Rate this song five stars” (for example) while one of your songs is playing.

  • Cellular Data lets you guard against having your streaming music eat up your monthly cellular data allowance. If it’s off, then you can download and play back music only over Wi-Fi.

  • Downloaded Music lets you see how much of your storage space is devoted to songs you’ve acquired.

  • Optimize Storage shows up only if you’re an Apple Music subscriber and you’ve turned on iCloud Music Library. As you download more songs from Apple Music, if your phone becomes full, this feature deletes the downloaded songs that you’ve played the least. (The Minimum Storage indicates how much music you get to keep before the autodeleting begins.) Of course, you’re always welcome to listen to them over the Internet, or download them again.

  • EQ, Volume Limit, Sound Check. See Switching Among Speakers.

  • Home Sharing. Conveniently enough, you can access your iTunes music collection, upstairs on your computer, right from your iPhone, over your home Wi-Fi network. Or at least you can if both machines are signed into the same Apple ID. Here’s where you enter the Apple ID that matches your iTunes setup.

TV

This is what you can adjust for the new TV app:

Photos & Camera

Here’s a motley collection of photo-related settings:

iBooks

Why, it’s every setting imaginable that pertains to the iBooks ebook reading app. They’re all described starting in iBooks Settings.

Podcasts

These settings affect the Podcasts app described in Podcasts. They govern how often the app auto-downloads new episodes, and how many; whether it can do so using cellular data (or only Wi-Fi); and whether you want the app to autodelete podcasts you’ve already heard.

Game Center

For millions of people, the iPhone isn’t a phone—it’s a mobile game console. In fact, until iOS 10 came along, there was even an app called Game Center. It was a way to compare scores with friends and challenge buddies to games. In iOS 10, the Game Center app is gone; now you’re supposed to invite players and see your place on leaderboards right inside each individual game app.

There’s still this Game Center page in Settings, though. Once you’ve logged into it with your Apple ID, you can allow Nearby Players to invite you to multiplayer games wirelessly, and you can create or edit your Game Center Profile (your player name). And when you get good and fed up, you can Remove all Game Center Friends—the nuclear option.

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo

These pages let you enter your name and password just once, in this one place, for each of these popular web services—so that the iPhone and its apps can freely access those accounts without having to bother you.

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Each of these panels also offers an Install button (previous page, left), making it quick and easy to download the official Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Vimeo apps.

The Twitter and Facebook options offer some additional choices:

TV Provider

As noted in The TV App, the new TV app is designed to let you watch all the shows you’re paying your cable or satellite company for—on your phone. At the outset, alas, very few major cable companies are playing ball with Apple. You can sign in here if you have an account from DirecTV, Dish, or a few obscure cable companies. But if you have, say, Comcast, Time Warner, or another big one, you’re probably out of luck.

App Preferences

At the bottom of the Settings screen, you see a list of apps that have installed settings screens of their own (previous page, right). For example, here’s where you can edit your screen name and password for the AIM chat program, change how many days’ worth of news you want the NY Times Reader to display, and so on. Each one offers an assortment of changeable preference options.

It can get to be a very long list.