Make use of a bug to speed-up your iPhone

8 March 2016, 14:41

Wow! Kudos to 9to5Mac for spotting this amazingly useful trick. There’s a bug with the accessibility tools on the iPhone that means you can deactivate the annoying zoom in/zoom out animations that appear when you start and leave apps, or wake your phone from sleep. As a result the iPhone feels much speedier and apps seem to start instantly when you tap them.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the Settings app, then tap General > Accessibility > AssistiveTouch, and tap the switch to enable AssistiveTouch.
2. A translucent square with a circle in will appear at the right of the screen. This is the AssistiveTouch tool but you can ignore that for now. Instead, click the Home button, then tap and drag the square to the very bottom right of the screen.
3. Drag down on the home screen to open Spotlight search and, just as the keyboard appears and the square shoots up to be above the keyboard, tap the screen to cancel the Spotlight search.

If you do this right then the bug will be activated. It might take quite a few attempts, though, and timing is critical. 9to5Mac has a video showing it in action. You’ll know you’ve got it right because the animation for getting rid of the Spotlight search field will look glitchy. You can test it by opening an app. If you’ve done it right the app will suddenly appear on screen, without any animated effect.

You can turn off Assistive Touch when you’ve got the bug to work.

We couldn’t get the bug to work on our iPad Air 2, but your milage may vary. Let us know in the comments.

9to5Mac reports that this bug sticks around until the phone reboots so you won’t have to repeat it and no permanent damage is being done. Apparently the bug isn’t (yet) fixed in the up-coming 9.3 release of iOS.

• 9to5Mac: How-To: Disable iOS SpringBoard animations and make your Home screen feel faster [Video]

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