That’s weird - I never have to unlock our iPhones to answer calls. My wife leaves her phone near the back door so is hardly ever near when it rings (she’d prefer that people call the house phone…) and I answer it all the time without unlocking it.
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Maybe there’s something I’m missing. I did manage to set the phone to stay on for a few minutes rather than shutting down in seconds, but I can’t find that control now.
We have now moved away from how to set this iPhone up in the way we need (in this case, for this user, in these circumstances) to what completely different solutions this user should use, should have used etc etc.
I know this kind of topic touches many people, this community has many members who have to advise those who just can’t get their head round tech.
I don’t want to loose a friend just because the new world is not anymore like the old, or because this user can’t or won’t think the way I do, or should do but clearly won’t. I do appreciate all the helpful comments, very useful for other cases that pop up once in a while.
This user is in Germany btw, I’m in the UK, at least I can have FaceTime calls with said hubby on the continent (For Brits everything is either “on the continent” or “on the other side of the pond.”)
So, if I may: What’s missing during my initial setup that I can’t proceed?
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The only thing I haven’t seen is that some Apple apps are now deletable, which should help with some of these unwanted notices. Sorry, I don’t have a list of these, so tell them to just attempt to delete the ones they never use.
I don’t think I can give a definitive answer, since I do not know if there may be constraints driven by the particular phone model, the version of iOS it is running, the region in which it is used, and other factors.
However, I have been tinkering with an old iPhone 8 running iOS 16.7.10 for completely different reasons, and it currently seems to be behaving the way you wish:
- It has no passcode, nor does it ever ask for one.
- The “Home” button works as simple button; it is not used for Touch ID.
- The iPhone is not associated with an Apple ID.
- It is being used only as a phone. Carrier voicemail is active, but Apple Visual Voicemail is not.
- Inbound and outbound SMS texting both work, but Apple iMessage is not activated.
- There is a red “alert” notification on the Settings app icon. The source of the notification is Apple prompting me to “Finish Setting Up Your iPhone.” At first, I also would receive banner pop ups prompting me to do that, too, but I think if you go into Settings and click on “Finish Setting Up Your iPhone” without actually setting anything, the pop-ups will stop popping up, but I may be wrong.
The iPhone used to belong to a family member, but it had been sitting in a drawer since the previous user bought a new phone. From memory, this is how I configured it:
- It still had the original physical SIM in it that had been deactivated when the previous user upgraded to a new phone.
- I ran through the steps in Apple’s “What to do before you sell, give away, or trade in your iPhone or iPad” to dissassociate the phone from the previous user’s accounts and to reset it completely. (Apologies for the US link. Perhaps the steps are different in Germany.)
- I replaced the original user’s SIM with a SIM that I pulled from a working iPhone 6s that already was on my carrier account. I don’t recall if I did that before or after I went through the steps in the support article above.
- I don’t recall if I had to contact the carrier’s support line to move the SIM. I actually think that wasn’t necessary. Perhaps that is only necessary if you want to enable Visual Voicemail features.
- When iOS prompted me to go through the various initial setup steps, I simply skipped/declined all of the setup steps, except for connecting to a WiFi network. Keep in mind that many of the options to skip/decline are buried in strange places (see below).
- When prompted to set up a passcode, I clicked on “Passcode Options” and chose “Don’t Use Passcode”.
- When prompted to sign in with an Apple ID, I clicked on “Forgot password or or don’t have an Apple ID?”, which allowed me to “Set Up Later in Settings”.
- The remaining setup steps are easily skipped.
- You may get scary warnings the first time you try to do things, like sending an SMS text without setting up the full iMessage environment. These generally can be ignored.
Aside from connecting to Wi-Fi, I think the only other settings I set were to update software automatically and to choose a higher contrast wallpaper. Again, I don’t know if these steps will work for your friend, but I wish you and her good luck.
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The only thing I can think of is that somewhere inside the complex of settings there is one that controls how long the iPhone remains on after being opened. It had been a matter of a few seconds, and I was able to change it to about 5 minutes, which made it somewhat usable. If you could find that and set it to a longer interval, it might make the iPhone more usable.
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@josehill I’m very grateful for the time you took to write down so many details. At the same time I have now tried out on an old 6s the EXACT steps, it seems great minds thinks alike. One notable difference: I chose activation via iTunes (the 6s on iOS 12.x knows no better wording). This works, I only needed to connect to a Mac and could chose there “Setup as a new iPhone” This way I didn’t need to enter WiFi details.
The home screen has now dimmed icons, because it’s not connected to the internet. I can and will remove them.
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Glad to read about the progress! Whatever Apps you can’t delete you could combine in a Folder and put that on another Home Screen, with the ‘main Home Screen’ containing only the Apps to be used (or put them in the Dock and have a nice photo fill the screen).
Simple flip phone from Lively - ( used to be Jitterbug ) works well
Sorry for the late reply, but for this situation I’d try the iPhone’s “Assistive Access” mode.
To set it up or to find out about it, go to Settings → Accessibility and scroll down to Assistive Access.
It gives your iPhone a very simple interface where everything is large and you choose which (simplified) apps are present.
Local verizon stores here still carry “feature” (flip) phones.
[Incidentally, those phones still seem to have have physical SIM cards – while most (all?) of the Apple & Android phones only have eSims. Though verizon, at least, will happily convert a number over from a SIM card or eSIM. Found this out recently while upgrading/converting some family flip phones with verizon.]