An elderly friend gets annoyed when her iPhone asks for her passcode, so we tried turning that off. But there are still situations where the iPhone asks for the passcode at seemingly random intervals. After much discussion over a few months, we decided that the iPhone should be set up with absolutely no smart features, no email, no passcode, nothing, just a phone. Don’t ask me about her reaction when we tried to use TouchID.
During the setup process, we’re presented with a screen asking us to sign in with our Apple ID, which does exist and is ‘in use’ on a MacBook Air (which is always operated by her husband on her behalf).
However, the button to sign in with the Apple ID is always grey. Has anyone managed to set up an iPhone for this use case?
Buy her a simple “dumb” phone and forget about the iPhone or any type of smartphone. She doesn’t want it. Whatever you may think, it is not easy to learn to use an iPhone, especially if you have the kind of vision limitations that come with age. If you need reading glasses and don’t wear them all the time, you can’t read much of what’s on the screen. When you touch it in the wrong place, it does things you don’t want it to do. My wife had a spare iPhone so when my dumb mobile phone died, she gave it to me. I tried it out of curiosity, but all in all it’s been very frustrating to try to use, especially for things that are simple on a dumb phone.
I was going to suggest a Jitterbug phone, but it does sound like flip-phone would be an even better choice. The thing is, nobody at Apple is testing (or designing for) features when so much has been removed or shut off. You’re sure to keep running into weird behaviors that will perplex her.
I have not had the opportunity to try. But if signing in with iCloud is required, and not having a passcode prevents signing in to iCloud, perhaps consider setting the passcode temporarily to something like 0000 during set up, sign in to iCloud, and then Settings / Passcode & Touch ID and turn off the passcode. Or set up by skipping the iCloud setup and then sign in after the fact at Settings / Apple Account - if that still isn’t available, then set the passcode temporarily and sign in and remove the passcode.
I understand why keeping the existing phone is attractive. But based on my experience with helping family members facing similar difficulties, I would buy a flip phone and invest the time needed to make the transition from the iPhone if I was trying to solve this problem.
Why? My main reasons are:
Flip phones are the closest cell phone equivalent to tradtional landline phones. Making and answering calls will be pretty familiar, especially if the person had cordless landline phones in the past (or still does).
A lot of non-tech native people rely on muscle memory to use iPhones, tablets, and desktops. Even if the person learns how to use the iPhone comfortably today, Apple continually changes the iOS interface and rapidly makes iPhone models obsolete. The way flip phones work is extremely stable.
A non-data phone plan will be cheaper than a iPhone plan each month.
A lot of security and privacy risks that come with smartphone use simply don’t exist with flip phones.
Most 2FA setups now will deliver log-on codes via voice calls in addition to SMS.
Flip phones don’t cost much.
Ongoing help and support needs will decrease signficantly with a flip phone.
Many thanks to all for patiently thinking through what world’ were entering here. I guess quiete some of us have had similar experiences.
Strictly speaking, signing in to iCloud is not required for this user, but I fear we have to, as iCloud seems to require a trusted tel number. This does exist in the existing iCloud account, and can’t be taken out (say via the MB Air). Somehow the iCloud dog seems to chase its tail (is this a valid metaphor?) I also think that perhaps this iPhone needs to be activated before we can use it (again).
Setting Passcode OFF ain’t working, in random intervals the iPhone still asks for it, we had this mayhem causing problem for some months now. There is also for some strange reason a SIM PIN which I will switch off as soon as I can get to the settings screens. But first I need to get there.
Can you remove it using a web browser at account.apple.com ? (First set some other recovery method, such as a recovery key and/or (a) recovery contact(s)).
Just one more thought: if the person who wants to keep the iPhone has a trusting personality, gets flustered easily, or feels most comfortable when pleasing other people, I would think very carefully about turning off all security and privacy functions on iCloud, Apple Account, and iPhone.
@mHm I’m very interested in the eventual solution to this. I am the tech support guy for an older family member who has no experience in tech outside having two iPhones and it makes a pretty confusing set of situations.
I looked at Assistive Access for iPhone but found it not only over simplified to the point of uselessness but also very many glitches.
Adam’s suggestion of Guided Access might be the trick, I have read about but not tried it.
Make sure your flip-phone (if you choose to use one) has access to your carrier’s network.
My brother’s old flip-phone was disabled when the carrier removed support for 2G (or was it 3G?).
That’s the nub of your challenge – an iPhone is NOT primarly or secondarily or even twentydarily a phone.
Never having used a computer of any sort, both my parents started using iPads in their mid/late 80s and became quite proficient in getting what they wanted from them, right through to their deaths in their mid 90s.
However, both of them found it impossible to use an iPhone as a phone, even with everything else blocked/locked off. They just couldn’t get their heads around it.
We ended up getting them an Alcatel 3026G flip phone and suddenly they were happily making phone calls and texting (SMS).
I just want to add that the point of the trusted phone number is to receive a recovery text message if you are trying to log in to the iCloud account on an untrusted device. If iCloud services are not going to be used, it’s not required to log in to it just because that phone number is the trusted number.
That said, the downside of not logging in to iCloud is that you won’t be able to use Find My to find it if it is lost (often a lost cause anyway) and you won’t have iCloud activation preventing it from being activated by someone else if it is lost/stolen and then “found” by someone else. [edit: also, no iMessage.]
Setting up with no passcode and even with assisted access should work for this. For me the one issue with a non-smartphone or “flip phone” is sending text messages, especially responding to messages that you receive. A smart phone with an onscreen keyboard and the ability to dictate a response will be much better than using T9 to try to respond to a text message. More and more medical offices are using text messages to remind people of upcoming appointments and ask for a response like “YES” or “NO”. For the people reading this on tidbits this is probably trivial using T9 on a dumb phone keypad. Maybe not so much for technical neophytes.
I’m not sure if we’re using different definitions of feature phones, but as far as I know, the major carriers still offer basic/flip phones, though they don’t make them easy to find on their websites.
Sorry. Must be outdated terminology. The last time I looked (many years ago), Verizon was using the term “Feature Phone” for phones that offer more than calling/texting (e.g. camera, voice recorder, ability to sync contacts with a computer, and maybe some apps for purchase from a proprietary app store) but are not smart phones. My old Motorola RAZRv3 fit this category.
It looks like this would be a subset of what Verizon is today calling a “basic phone”.
So they do. And yes, it was hard to find that page.
From Verzon’s home page, both the “Phones” and “Devices” links all go to a page with nothing but smartphones.
To see basic phones, I needed to click on Shop → Devices → Other Phones → Basic Phones.
When I dug into the AT&T site for a flip phone called the TCL Classic https://www.att.com/buy/phones/tcl-classic.html, which looks exactly like the crappy phone they sent me when they shut down 3G. It died in two years and was never difficult to use. What it did have that I did not appreciate at the time was that picking up the phone let me talk with the caller. My iPhone does not; it requires me to enter a passcode, which usually means I have to put on my reading glasses either to enter the password or to make some other selection. The TouchID does not work, and I note that some of older folks, like my wife, do not have fingerprints that TouchID can recognize.