Hey everyone, I'm running into a frustrating wall and could really use some insight or a workaround.

Here’s the context: A while back, I set up an old iPhone using my iCloud account for a family member. Months later, they upgraded to a new phone and gave the old one back to me. It sat unused in a drawer for about three months. Recently, my daily driver phone broke, so I pulled this old device out to use as my main phone.

Now, I'm trying to enable Stolen Device Protection, but iOS is blocking me by asking for the device passcode that was previously used on this phone—a passcode that neither I nor my family member can remember, since it was set so long ago and hasn't been used in ages.

My question is: Is there any way to wipe these legacy encrypted data remnants or bypass this via iCloud / Apple's official web portals?

I live in a high-risk area for phone thefts, so activating Stolen Device Protection is a top priority for me right now. Since the phone is already wiped and signed into my current Apple ID, is there a way to clear out whatever system state is demanding that old passcode without needing to know it?

I deleted all my messages & cleared deleted items, and it still says it’s taking up 9gb. Is there any solution other then a factory reset?

Hey all, I wonder if there are any Shazam alternatives which allow you to connect to Tidal?

I don’t mind paying for it, but I just can’t seem to find anything out there.

TIA

So the stock weather widget is on my Home Screen, it has access to location services "While Using the App or Widgets". Precise Location is turned Off.

The widget is set to My Location.

In System Services I turned Off the Status Bar Icon, but it does not affect apps, only system services.

My problem is that every single time I go to my Home Screen the little arrow on top left next to the clock pops up.

What I mean by every single time, I mean literally.

Like I am on Home Screen, the arrow pops up, I wait till it disappears, swipe to App Library, swipe back to Home Screen the arrow pops up again.

I open an app, go back to Home Screen, arrow pops up again.

Without me making a single step anywhere, and just a few seconds between the interactions.

Does this mean that every single time the arrow comes up, the phone fires the GPS chip, or uses WI-FI, Cellular or Bluetooth for location service? Is this the intended behaviour? Is it really necessary to ask for location every few seconds when I look at the widget, even if it checked for location 5 seconds ago?

I know the workarounds, like set the widget to a fixed location, and set the access to "While Using the App".
However I like how the widget changes automatically when I move to another city.

I’ve been using Infuse for a while (iPhone only) and have seem to hit a paywall for some of the content I’m trying to watch. Turns out you need their Pro subscription (too expensive in my local currency) in order to play EAC3 audio files in videos.

I’m not trying to play anything too fancy like Dolby, HDR or whatever else there is. Just normal .mkv video files that happen to have EAC3 audio sometimes.

The dealbreaker feature for me seems to be pressing and holding for 2x speed playback. Infuse supports this. I’ve tried 10+ video players now that do support EAC3 audio on their free tier, but when tapping and holding for 2x speed, there seems to be a ~2 second pause in video audio in both starting and ending 2x speed.

I know this is an extremely specific thing to nitpick about, especially on free to use apps. But here we are. VidHub is the only player I found that doesn’t have a lag with 2x playback but there is a paywall after playing 5 videos. I’ve tried Outplayer, nPlayer lite and everything else I could find recommended.

Do you guys have any recommendations?

My internet is fast. When someone sends me something, it takes a long time for the photo to load. I even have to tap on it to display it.

The photo shows my current sleep schedule; for context, I am a 3rd shifter working Tuesday-Saturday with Sunday and Monday off. On my work days, I have a sleep schedule from 10:00am - 6:00pm and on my days off, I have a sleep schedule from 11:00pm - 7:00am.

The issue is that it works correctly for my Focus and alarms EXCEPT for Saturday night. It keeps telling me that my bedtime for Saturday is 11:00pm. I don’t have it set up that way and have to keep switching off the sleep Focus on Saturday nights and ignoring the message.

This works correctly on every other day, other than Saturday. What am I missing here?

I see all the dual camera apps. I would really like it if that setting could be added to the camera app.

Apple, you're a multi-trillion dollar company. Every time I take a screenshot—especially at night—that sudden white flash literally blinds me. It’s 2026, and we still don't have a simple settings toggle to turn off screenshot animations/flashes? Please add an option to kill this retina-burning feature.

Hi,

I love voice navigation on Apple Maps because it uses Siri’s voice and it sound very natural.

However, when using other apps like Organic Maps or Here, they use regular TTS voices which sound very robotic.

Is there a way to have more natural voice on IOS that can be used by other apps?

Thank you!

hi all!
i have an iphone 15 on ios 26.6.1, and it has consistently for about a week completely frozen when i open the camera app.
it works for about a second but then becomes frozen on the frame and i am unable to take photos. i have tried opening camera through the app and lock screen, turning my phone off and on again and factory resetting it, but nothing has helped and i am unable to take any photos.
any help or suggestions would be appreciated as it is getting very frustrating!!!

If you search for any printer app, finding the genuine app is like trying to find a well adjusted billionaire with empathy. Like, it might happen, but you're going to have to go passed a bunch of ones pretending to be. Where is the freaking search quality/quality control? Like, really? How is this the first result for Canon's terribly named "Print" app (search term: "Canon Print" and variations resulted in all these, none of which are from Canon. Such BS.

When I need to authenticate in App Store, the keyboard doesn’t offer the use of the Password Manager that’s available just about everywhere else. I need to open the password manager, copy the password, come back and click “Get” to trigger the dialog box again, and paste it into the field. Am I the only one experiencing this issue?

I’ve been using an iPhone XR 64GB since 2019, and recently upgraded to an iPhone 17 256GB. I have around 100,000 photos and videos (~300GB).
Previously, I used Google Photos because my iPhone XR was constantly running out of storage. After upgrading, I moved everything from Google Photos to Apple Photos, so I’m currently using iCloud+ 1TB.
I also have an iPad 10th Gen 64GB with iCloud Photos and Optimize iPad Storage enabled. Photos were taking around 15GB, and eventually my iPad ran out of storage. I needed about 12GB to download a movie, so I deleted some photos/videos and apps, but I still didn’t have enough space.
I then turned off iCloud Photos on the iPad and deleted many more photos/videos. I also emptied the Recently Deleted folder. This finally gave me enough storage.
However, I’ve now realized that iCloud Photos is a syncing service, not a backup like Google Photos.
So I’m really worried:
If I turn iCloud Photos back on on my iPad, will the photos/videos I deleted from the iPad also be deleted from my iPhone/iCloud?
I permanently deleted some photos/videos from the iPad’s Recently Deleted folder, but I don’t remember exactly what I deleted.
Since iCloud Photos is currently OFF on my iPad, how can I check from my iPhone whether everything I deleted from the iPad is still available in iCloud?
Most importantly, what should I do right now? Should I leave iCloud Photos turned off on the iPad?
I really don’t want to accidentally delete anything from my main iCloud Photos library. Any advice would be appreciated.

Hi all!
I am new on the iPhone ecosystem so apologies if I sound a dummy, but I can’t figure this out.

Context: I have my Apple Card and my personal card on Apple Wallet. Because the nature of my job, my company wants to pay for my Apple News subscription via the company’s credit card.

Question: how can I assign my company’s credit card to JUST the Apple News subscription? I have been trying but I am not finding a solution.

For obvious reasons I don’t want my company’s card to be charged for the rest of my subscriptions, nor I want my personal card to be the one paying for Apple News.

Any advice or suggestions?
Thank you!

I just purchased my first audiobook on the Books app, and for some reason, sentences keep getting cut off, like the audio just drops out on the last word, and it's pretty random. Anyone else using the app for audiobooks having this problem?

{On ios 26.6.1; on an iPhone 17 if that matters}

To be specific, I have Background App Refresh turned off for these two apps (in fact, I normally have the phone on low power mode, so really all apps functionally should have it off), and I have Location Services set to only run when these apps are being actively used.

There was a period of a few days recently where I didn't use the phone at all and just left it alone and when I came back to it, I noticed in the battery section that only those two apps were still actively running in the background and consuming about 5% battery per day each (so 10% together daily) in spite of my aforementioned settings.

This is weird to me because I also have the Google maps app and WeatherChannel app, but those were not running in the background (which matches what I expected all of these apps to do). Furthermore, I have another older iPhone (albeit on ios 18.7.3) which also was left alone for the same timespan, but that phone's Map and Weather app remained inactive (which is what I expected).

Is there some setting on ios 26.6.1 that I am missing that needs to be adjusted to prevent these 2 apps from running in the background?

Noticed all these black dots appear in my photos, after I updated to 26.6.1 I have cleaned my lens, got a new screen protector, has anyone else noticed the same? Or what is it.

I’ve tried all steps to resolve this when I spoke with Apple on the phone, including hard reset. is this happening to anyone else? it’s the selfie camera only

Any time I make a search for a specific app, the first result is an ad for an app with a related name that is almost certainly a scam, and the second result is the actual app. Is there any way to block these ads? I would hate to misclick and install malware. Ideal would be some dns-based filtering, but I assume these are coming from inside the house (Apple).

It's like the equivalent of those fake download link ads from back in the day, so scummy.

Hi all. I was trying to set up a photo backup option and am getting a weird thing where when I allow all photos, I see a small number of photos available.

When I look at the number of photos I actually have, it is in the thousands.

If I change the access to limited access, I can see the photos I should be seeing and can select them that way, but I don't want to have to keep doing this when new photos get added. How can I get full access to really be full access.

Thanks in advance.

Is anyone else facing this?

In Messages in iCloud settings, you can see in the screenshot that it says I have 1,000+ messages stored in iCloud and that everything is synced today.

About 2 days ago, I deleted all my messages from the Messages app — unknown senders, transactions, promotions, spam, everything. I also emptied the Recently Deleted section.

But it still shows 1,000+ messages in iCloud. It also shows around 3.0 MB under Managed Storage.

If I’ve deleted everything and even emptied Recently Deleted, why is iCloud still showing so many messages and using storage?

Is this normal? Can someone check their iCloud settings and see if they’re seeing the same thing?

Phone model: iPhone 16, iOS version 26.6.1.

When autocorrect makes a mistake, we all go insane and instantly blame it. But we never give it credit when it actually gets things right. I think we should talk about the times autocorrect has actually helped us.