HA needed a new phone. She’s been using an iPhone SE gen 2 I bought for her about six years ago. It’s still quite functional after a recent battery replacement, but the sparsity of cellular towers on this island means that she’d really benefit from the additional radio bands that have been added to iPhone hardware since 2020. We found a good deal on a refurbished iPhone 16e from Apple.
Holly Ann is brilliant, but she’s not geeky. She uses her phone for only very basic things, and the SE(2) was already running the latest iOS, and she’s great at figuring things out, so I didn’t expect her to find that much was challenging about the phone.
I currently run GrapheneOS on a Pixel phone, but I had been an iPhone user since the 3G. I still have several iPhones that I use from time to time, including another SE(2) running iOS 26 and I am — or was — pretty familiar with the interface. I assured her I’d be happy to help if she ran into any problems.
hover text
The transfer of data from her old phone to the new went swimmingly. She did it all herself and was pleased with the result, until she went to send a text in landscape mode. “What now?” she exclaimed, and handed me the phone. There was the keyboard, and a big black box blocking out everything else. She was, I think, hoping to see the message to which she was responding. She said she had already tried quitting and restarting Messages and had even rebooted the phone, but the black box came back and made answering her texts frustrating and nigh impossible.
I had never seen such a thing, but a Kagi search on “iOS black box blocking interface” yielded dozens (hundreds?) of posts by frustrated iPhone users. It turns out it’s called “hover text” and it’s some kind of accessibility feature that for some unfathomable reason Apple had decided to enable by default for some users. A swipe and six or so clicks later, and Messages was useful once again. I would never have thought to search for “hover text,” a name Apple just made up which is a lot of things, but neither descriptive nor helpful. Fortunately for iOS users, a search on “ios cursed black box” will find what you need to know.
do not disturb
Next, she started missing text messages because Do Not Disturb was enabled. She is a hospice worker, and some of those texts are unimaginably timely. I remembered some of this: once upon a time, there was a Do Not Disturb feature. Swipe up to open Control Center, tap on the Do Not Disturb widget, and you’d get the option to turn it off (if it was on) or the option to turn it on, or turn it on for a certain length of time, or turn it on until you moved to a new location. Pretty straightforward.
”focus”
Now, there’s “focus.”
I remember when they made the change and I reacted with “oh, brother.” Instead of “On, On until…, or Off” you suddenly had over a full screen of options NONE OF WHICH WERE “OFF”. But that was a couple of years ago, and I was unprepared for what I found the next time she handed me the phone and said “How do I turn off Do Not Disturb?”
I knew to go to “focus”. But that brought me to screen after screen after screen of truly nonsense options. Useful to somebody, somewhere? Sure, probably. But for 99.99% of people most of those options are just noise blocking out the music. The internet is alive with folks who have completely lost focus trying to turn off Do Not Disturb (which, even more annoyingly, still displays as “Do Not Disturb” even though the “Focus” settings, which control it, do not seem to use that name).
Again, a search for “how do I turn off do not disturb” yielded dozens of anguished posts. There are also many answers to that question, some as crazy as “you have to tell Siri to turn on do not disturb, then ask Siri to turn it off.” Another poster allowed as how he couldn’t believe people couldn’t figure it out, it’s so simple, and posted a three page long list of instructions for accomplishing the task.
So it turns out you can go to Control Center, but to get there, instead of swiping up as was the case for pre-FaceID phones, you now have to swipe down… but not just swipe down, but swipe down from the right side of the screen. No.no.no… not the right edge of the screen, the top edge, but the right side of the top edge. Got it? Then, if you’re lucky, there will be a “focus” widget there. It looks like a button with an icon and the word “focus” — what could be simpler? Well, if you tap that button, there’s a 50/50 chance it won’t work because you have to tap on the left half of the button, not the right half. They’re different, you see? One button, two different functions depending on where on the button you tap. What’s so hard about that?
And in case that wasn’t complicated enough, there are post after post after post of people who finally figured out how to turn off Do Not Disturb only to have it turn itself back on hours later, even though they have no schedules set to do so. There are long threads speculating about various reasons why this might happen. What there isn’t is a trivial sure-fire way to make it stop.
I don’t know how Apple lost their focus, but they sure did.
—2p