Apple iOS 9.3.1 Has A Great Secret Feature

Apple is a Band-Aid. It was rushed out to fix serious problems with iOS 9.3 and, by and large, it succeeded. What’s more, it also contains a great secret feature…  

9to5Mac has discovered iOS 9.3.1 can run Night Shift and Low Power Mode simultaneously, as long as you follow a particular combination.

For those not in the know, Night Shift (a bluelight filter which aids sleep) was the highest profile addition to iOS 9.3 so running it in conjunction with Low Power Mode would appear to be a no brainer. After all you’re most likely to use Night Shift at the end of the day when your phone’s battery is most likely to be low.

Yet Apple disagreed and by default running one disables the other.

So How Do You Fix It? Follow These Steps:
==>>Enable Low Power Mode via ‘Settings –> Battery’

==>>Start Siri and say “Enable Night Shift”. Siri will reply: “In order to turn on Night Shift, I’ll have to turn off Low Power Mode. Shall I continue?”

==>>Reply “Yes” and press the sleep button before the response is confirmed. You will then hear Siri’s confirmation beep

==>>Unlock your iPhone and, providing you did step 3 correctly, you will see both Night Shift and Low Power Mode are enabled at the same time

==>>One quirk of this trick is you will find Night Shift to be greyed out in both Settings and the Control Center afterwards. This doesn’t matter, you can still manually switch off Night Shift and Low Power mode as normal.

Interestingly this secret feature appears to be more a handy bug in iOS 9.3.1 than something Apple created by design.

Aside from the obvious hoop jumping to enable it being a giveaway, the other factor is iOS 9.3.1 actually closed a previous workaround for enabling both modes simultaneously. With iOS 9.3 you just asked Siri to enable one while running the other, but iOS 9.3.1 forces you to add ‘Step 4’ to the process.

In the meantime iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners running iOS 9.3.1 still have a handy trick up their sleeves. They also have a brilliant new iPhone option.