ED#141 : AssistiveTouch Bug In Apple's New iOS 6

Earlier this year, I wrote about Apple's AssistiveTouch feature - a nifty little feature that most of us thought was to make it for the disabled to use the Apple iPhone. Well, that too, but it also allowed us, able-bodied people, to protect the iPhone's "less than robust" Home button so that it wouldn't die on us so quickly.

Needless to say, once you tried it, you will likely not go back to using the Home button. Now that I'm used to it, I find it much easier to use the AssistiveTouch button than the actual Home button! I'm sure quite a few of you feel the same way too.

Fast forward to the release of iOS 6, and this feature starts getting the wrong kind of love. This is because a bug in iOS 6 has caused the iPhone's Auto-Lock feature to fail... if AssistiveTouch is enabled, and is the last thing you used.

Yes, if you used the AssistiveTouch button to quit an application and go to the Home screen, the iPhone (or other iDevices using iOS 6) will not automatically lock the screen after a preset delay. Instead, it will be left running - whatever password you set to protect the data sitting in your iDevice is thus pretty much a moot point.

Obviously, this is a big problem (for a small bug) because AssistiveTouch is usually the last thing we use before we leave our iDevices idle!

Imagine leaving your iPhone on the coffee table while you go to the bathroom, assuming as always that Auto-Lock is going to keep your secret sex videos safe from prying eyes. Next thing you know - you come out of the bathroom to find your buddies laughing at how you do the humpa-humpa.

Fortunately, there's a workaround, or as folks in Apple-land will say - a new and better way to do things!

All you need to do is just do something else after using AssistiveTouch. It can be anything as innocuous as touching any part of the screen (without touching an app, of course - that would defeat the purpose!) or sliding to another screen. As long as the AssistiveTouch action is not the last activity performed by you, Auto-Lock will kick in.

Of course, as much as we Apple users enjoy this "new and better way to do things", we implore the Apple iOS team to quickly fix this little bug, as well as this other small problem in iOS 6 - the new Apple Maps.

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