The 6 Most Annoying iPhone Settings & How to Fix Them

The iPhone is easily one of the best pieces of technology ever invented, but let’s just go ahead and admit that nothing is perfect. There are a few default settings on the iPhone that are just plain annoying, but within just a minute or two you can fix all of that with a handful of simple adjustments, and have a much better experience.

All of these tricks apply to just about every semi-modern version of iOS, including iOS 7, though the latter will obviously look a bit different. Let’s get started.

1: Goodbye to iMessage Read Receipts

Read Receipts are those little “Read” notifications that appear when you or someone else sends you an imessage, and just as the name implies they show up to the sender to signify if the recipient has actually read the message or not. Obviously that would be useful on a limited basis if you could control who sees those and who doesn’t, but you can’t. So let’s get rid of them all and gain a bit of privacy:

• Open Settings and head to “Messages”
• Flip the “Send Read Receipts” switch so that it’s set to OFF

If you get bombarded with tons of text messages that you can’t possibly reply to, then Read Receipts are not your friend. The “Delivered” message is good enough, so grab your iPhone and turn these off.

2: Disable the Keyboard Click Sound Effects

Do you really want little sound effects playing every single time you type a character on the iPhone? I didn’t think so, let’s turn those off:

• Go to Settings, then tap on “Sounds”
• Scroll to the bottom and flip “Keyboard Clicks” to OFF

I admit there is some limited use to these especially while you’re initially learning to type better on the touch keyboard, but once you get the hang of it they are annoying to you and everyone around you.

WAIT! Don’t close out of those Sound settings quite yet though, because the next tip is right next to it…

3: Lose the Lock Screen Noises

When you tap the power button to lock the screen, you hear a click. When you swipe to unlock the iPhone, you hear another click. That’s two too many clicks. This sound effect was useful back in the early days of the iPhone when we were all getting accustomed to no longer inadvertently pocket dialing people, but with the touch screen and lock screen it became irrelevant, so it’s time to just turn this off:

• Go to Settings, then tap on “Sounds”
• Scroll down and flip “Lock Screen Sounds” to OFF

Now you can lock and unlock the iPhone in silence. Much better.

4: Turn Off Unnecessary Notifications & Alerts

A common mistake for newcomers to the iPhone (and iOS in general) are to tap that “Allow” button for every single app that gets installed and wants to push notifications to your device. This quickly builds up to a point of nearly constant annoyance and nagging from a myriad of apps telling you all sorts of useless pieces of information that you really don’t need pushed to the lock screen, let alone Notification Center. Be discerning with what Notifications you allow, keep it to the important ones, and turn off the pointless crud:

• Open Settings then tap on “Notifications”
• Tap any app that you no longer want notifications and alerts for, and flip “Notification Center” to OFF
• Choose “None” for Alert Style
• Repeat with every app that isn’t genuinely useful

This is one of those things that I do for my less tech savvy friends and family when I get ahold of their iPhones, since they inevitably have way too much stuff going on that they complain about. This also has the lovely side effect of increasing battery life, so be selective and turn off the pointless stuff that needlessly sends out alerts.

5: Turn Off Repeating Text Alert Sounds

If you ignore an inbound text message or iMessage, you’ll get pinged twice with an alert sound; once when it arrives, and another in a few minutes to remind you. This happens even though you only got one message. With how often most of us look at and use our phones, this is just unnecessary.

• Go to Settings, then go to “Messages”
• Select “Repeating Alert” and choose “Never”

Goodbye repeating alerts, you won’t be missed.

6: Sayonara to the Useless Red Badge Icons

We all want to know how many phone calls we have missed, and how many new emails we have, those are useful. But do we really want badge icon updates on every single app? Probably not, especially for the useless apps or the ones that aren’t doing anything useful, so go through Notification Center and clean this up a bit:

• Open Settings and then go to “Notification Center”
• Tap on any app that you want to disable the red badge icons for, then scroll down and flip “Badge App Icon” to OFF

These have long been frustrating, and your home screen will be much less distracting with most of these little red icon additions turned off.