In iOS 10, Apple has redesigned the entire Lock screen experience, eliminating the "Slide to Unlock" feature and changing the unlocking interaction on its most recent devices.
On the iPhone 6s, 6s Plus, 7, and 7 Plus, a new "Raise to Wake" feature that automatically activates the screen of the iPhone changes the unlocking interaction, requiring a physical button press to open the iPhone to the Home button. In iOS 9, no actual button press was required, as unlocking the iPhone was done just by touching the Touch ID button.
The change to the iPhone unlocking system has been unsettling for some users, but luckily, there's a way to fix it and return to the iOS 9 setting.
- Open the Settings app
- Go to the General section
- Choose Accessibility
- Scroll down to Home button and tap the option
- Toggle on "Rest Finger to Open"
With "Rest Finger to Open" turned on, a finger on the Home button will once again unlock the iPhone to the Home screen, returning it to iOS 9 functionality.
Raise to Wake and the new unlocking system are arguably an improvement over the previous iOS 9 unlocking methods, so users may want to try to get used to the new system instead of making the change. With Raise to Wake and the press to unlock feature, you can see all of your notifications without accidentally bypassing them, which is convenient.
Top Rated Comments
(1) Pressing the home button is awkward; swiping is natural. They should have left an option to swipe to unlock even with the "wake on rise" mode on.
(2) I don't want my notifications showing before the device is unlocked. What is the point of having a password and a thumbprint lock if anyone can see notifications as they come into the phone? I don't want to have to go through the extraordinarily kludgy process of, one by one, selecting all of my 500+ apps and manually setting them to not send notifications to the home screen.
(3) Notifications have never been done very well in iOS. I greatly prefer how it was in the Palm Pre, where a notification would remain on the screen in unlocked mode until it was dismissed, rather than only popping up briefly before disappearing. That way I could leave something on the screen until I had time to deal with it, and it would keep reminding me to deal with it because it was still there on my screen until I dismissed it. I hate having to swipe down into the Control center thing, then scroll through a list of 400 majillion notifications from every freaking app, since nowadays they ALL want to constantly spam you with crap like eBay saying "New Items are now on eBay! Come look!" (Well no crap, Sherlock!) Or Future Music: "Get up to 89 issues of Future music for just $47.99" or Sleep Cycle "Good Morning!" etc. I hate all that!
(4) There should be an option to show the notifications screen immediately after unlock as the homepage of the phone, rather than always showing me the apps screen first. The apps screen is basically useless; it hasn't been changed since they added app folders, but app folders are a huge pain in the butt to use because you have to drag an app across 12 screens of other apps and folders, and if you drop it in the wrong place (which is easy to do) then it will screw up the app tiling on all the subsequent pages! Why have they still not added the ability to long-press on an app and then be shown a list of all folders and pages on the device (like the screen you see in iTunes) so that you can send an app directly to the proper folder? Why don't they have the ability to select which folder an app will go into when you download it from the App Store the first time?! Why does it always dump in on whatever the first page with an open slot was? I was keeping those slots open FOR A REASON, so that if I accidentally drop an app somewhere, there is some buffer space and every subsequent page won't get all screwed up!
Come on Apple! Where is your brain these days?
OK, seriously, I posed this question during the beta as my "test mule" is an iPad Mini 2. Agree, it's a PITA if you don't have Touch ID and Apple SHOULD HAVE left an option for slide to unlock, at least for non-Touch ID models as that is what they were designed with.
I think Apple's end-game is to frustrate customers with older machines so they upgrade. It seems Tim Cook's eco-friendliness nature goes no farther than his wallet.
But why completely abandon Slide to unlock??
In the end, this is a good tip for all those that do not like the "new way".