Don't use Control Center to turn off Bluetooth on iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Don't use Control Center to turn off Bluetooth on iPhone

androidauthority.com

25 pointsmicroflash39 comments

I had no idea. And I don’t think one could reasonably expect that behavior. This is asshole design.

What if there were a toggle for your mic or camera that had this same design? Would a user reasonably expect that those would still be accessible?

iOS is really weird for some things. User hostile for sure.

Like why won’t iOS let me lock phone in landscape mode??! Or why does the alarm music always start on full volume?? Why can’t it play voice notes in order instead of just one at a time? Why can’t I change the font for the clock on Lock Screen other than those silly limited options?

Not to discount your valid complaints, but I'll take that over the preinstalled, non-removable fortnite installer that I got on my experia ;-)

You can't use ADB to remove it?

This is the opposite of user hostile. The average iOS user is my mom. She’d get completely confused if she turned off Bluetooth and the phone would actually do that - she’d call me the next day to ask why she could no longer AirDrop a photo to my dad or why the kitchen speaker stopped working.

Also note that when you press this button in control center, it displays a small banner to the effect off “all Bluetooth devices disconnected until tomorrow”.

Does your mom know what Bluetooth devices are?

Maybe the better icon would be something that just refers to “connected devices” rather than a protocol. And in doing so it even makes a bit more sense for things like AirDrop that may use a modified version of the protocol or a mix of Bluetooth and wifi (I think it negotiates via bt and transfers via wifi?).

When this change was made several years ago on iOS, I was quite annoyed because I had the habit of turning off WiFi and Bluetooth periodically (mainly to stay disconnected). I think I even provided feedback to Apple (from the public feedback page) to change this to a three-way toggle — On, Disconnect Devices, and Off. This idea had been proposed by many other people too. Since Apple rarely takes such feedback into consideration and does things the way it imagines is best for users, I had to go to settings and turn these off every time.

Later (maybe a year or so), I found that turning these off was possible through shortcuts. Since then, I have one widget to turn these off and an automation (within the Shortcuts app) that turns off WiFi at bedtime. I use this regularly because I just don’t want WiFi turning on at 5 a.m. the next day.

What is the use case for turning off WiFI at bedtime?

Can’t you just use airplane mode and toggle wifi off, both in the control panel? Together with airplane mode, the wifi toggle does actually turn WiFi completely off. I believe that airplane mode even remembers that preference. Or do you have a use case for having wifi turned off but mobile services turned on?

I'd think having wifi turned off while mobile services are on is very common when on the go.

I also use Shortcuts for this, but instead I saved it as an icon on the home screen. So now I have a dedicated "app" for turning wifi off, perfect.

newscracker, I just want to say THANK YOU. Ever since the iPhone has made this change, it's been a minor frustration of mine, like a constant pebble in my shoe, since I have the habit of going into Airplane mode with wifi on every time I go inside to a venue with wifi (b/c the health consequences of having such a strong 4G signal so close to my body are unclear to me; better to be safe than sorry) and the lots of clicks (settings, cellular data, turn it off; settings, wifi, turn wifi on; etc) has been this pebble in the shoe pain. But I had no idea you could define a shortcut for these and I never thought to. I just designed shortcuts to turn them on and off and put it on my homescreen and it is AMAZING. So, thank you, newscracker, for sharing this tidbit.

Even more annoying is the way iOS, iPadOS and macOS turn on Bluetooth and WiFi after every single system update even if I turned them off.

There are hacks with Shortcuts to properly toggle them on and off. But why do I need such hacks in the first place?

Why are you turning it off? It's probably a superstition and not a real reason.

Simply conserving battery life?

And according to the article iPhone users that thought their Bluetooth was turned off were vulnerable to attacks; that's not a superstition.

Turning off WiFi makes your battery life worse, because you'll forget to turn it back on.

Even if you're not joined to anything, it doesn't matter. The cellular antenna is the only one that uses any significant power.

> Turning off WiFi makes your battery life worse, because you'll forget to turn it back on

What? (I'm not OP)

Turning off Wi-Fi makes your battery life worse [because the cellular radio uses significantly more energy and you'll forget to turn it back on when you're around Wi-Fi again].

I don't use WiFi and Bluetooth frequently. I use mobile data on iOS and wired connection with macOS. Probably I'm too old now and this way of connecting devices is now a niche :)

The battery will last months if it's turned off "all the way". I think needing many months, away from a charger, is a very very niche use case.

Isn't this common knowledge for iOS users? It's definitely the desired behavior: I occasionally want to temporarily, and quickly, disconnect from something like my car. I never want to break Handoff, AirDrop, FindMy, or seamless connection to my AirPods.

I've never heard of it, and I doubt most users have.

Reminds how me if you turn your iPhone off, it's not really off either.

Apple really needs to hone these 'evil' behaviors in before regulations come down the pipe about it.

If your phone was "really off" the system clock would say 1969 when you turned it back on. Who would that benefit?

I can unplug my desktop computer from the outlet and plug it back in, and the clock will stay the same.

That's because part of it is still on and has a battery/supercapacitor backing it. The above post is complaining about this.

They’re actually complaining about the fact that it still keeps some wireless services turned on when the device is off, for example to find your phone or to use nfc for public transportation. I don’t think anyone complains that it keeps track of the time.

That would be because there's a battery on your motherboard keeping the RTC alive.

I feel like there is a lot of steps between "so off that it looses the track of current time" and whatever exactly iphone does.

There aren't tho.

The only other thing that stays on is the NFC (for express transit cards) and Find My iPhone (for finding it). Which you can turn off if you want, I suppose, but I don't think even the EU would mandate you must lose your phone if it's turned off.

> must lose your phone if it's turned off.

I think the EU would very much mandate that your phone being "off" means you're not holding a tracking device that will report your location, to, say, your stalker.

Would be an unproductive way of doing it (that's what "AirTag traveling with you" detection is for) but they'd probably just mandate the tracker has to show you a cookie popup.

'allow only essential stalkers'

Actually it would say 2001 since that is the epoch on iOS.

Don't be a moron.

Keeping power to quartz crystal and keeping power to a CPU core executing code are two completely different things.

And besides, the phone can get the current time from the cell network when in boots, so your point is moot anyway.

Some people don't actually use it as a phone or otherwise connect it to anything that provides time info (think a kiosk iPad) so it is an issue. Enormous time jumps also tend to find bugs in your system, like if there's a task that deletes old data but it turns out it's not actually old.

> mute

Did you know it's "moot"?

Not every network supports that (and it’s sometimes off by quite a few seconds!), and not every place on earth has cell signal or Wi-Fi coverage.

What’s evil about being able to track my own phone even after the battery runs out?

I use a jailbreak tweak for this: https://github.com/PoomSmart/CCOnOff

But why?

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