iOS 10 is a big upgrade in many different ways, not least because you can finally delete the Stocks app. But there’s a few changes that leave us scratching our heads, and the new “press to unlock” is one of them.
In iOS 10, rather than swiping to unlock, you press the home button. That either unlocks using Touch ID, or takes you to the PIN entry. It forces you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about iPhones, and it’s been making my head hurt since May. Luckily, Apple buried a setting deep inside the menus to make life a little better.
DON’T MISS: 8 cool iOS 10 features you probably haven’t found yet
If you go to General–>Accessibility–>Home Button, there’s a setting called “Rest Finger to Open.” It removes the need for you to physically push the home button to unlock your device. It lets you just hold your finger to the Touch ID sensor, and if your fingerprint is accepted, the phone will unlock.
I don’t know why Apple felt the need to bury the setting deep in the Accessibility menu, which is normally where it hides settings it doesn’t really want you to touch. Press home to unlock is the worst part about iOS 10, especially because it’s killed the iconic swipe to unlock.
Complaining about having to press a button to open your magic hand-computer is probably the most first-world whining since New Coke came out, but it’s actually a valid complaint.
Surveys have suggested that users unlock iPhones somewhere around 80 times per day. There’s around 100 million iPhones in use in the US alone, which means that 2,929,000,000,000 iPhone unlocks happen in the US alone every year. Even if only half of those are Touch ID devices running iOS 10, that means one tiny UI change from an Apple engineer is forcing 1,460,000,000,000 more button presses per year. That’s a lot of button presses.
Don’t accept Apple’s slavery to the button. Enable Rest Finger to Open. Fight the Man.
