How to change how quickly your iphone locks

By default, when you leave your iPhone or iPad unlocked, it will lock itself and turn off the display after one minute. This is great if you want to save battery life, but really annoying if you’re using it as a cookbook or other reference that you occasionally glance at. The good news is you can change how long it takes before Auto-Lock kicks in on your iPhone or iPad. Here’s how.

Go to Settings > Displays & Brightness > Auto-Lock.

Next, select how long you want your iOS device’s screen to stay on for. On an iPhone you can choose between 30 Seconds, 1 Minute, 2 Minutes, 3 Minutes, 4 Minutes, or Never (which will keep the screen on indefinitely). On an iPad, you can choose between 2 Minutes, 5 Minutes, 10 Minutes, 15 Minutes, or Never.

RELATED: How to Use Low Power Mode on an iPhone (and What Exactly It Does)

I’ve set my iPhone to 3 Minutes and my iPad to 15 Minutes. Conserving battery life is far more important for my phone than my tablet. Pick the values that work for you.

You can also always temporarily set Auto-Lock to 30 seconds by enabling Low Power Mode on your iPhone, which makes loads of tweaks to save battery life.

How to increase or decrease screen timeout on your iPhone or iPad

Open Settings → Display & Brightness.
Tap Auto-Lock.
Choose any of the time limits on the screen:
Select Never to keep your device’s screen awake the whole time someone else uses it.
Finally, tap Back at the top left.

That’s it! You can tweak these timeout settings any time you want to either extend or decrease auto-lock timing on your iPhone.

Note: The above settings only affect auto-lock on iPhone. Your device will still lock up when you press the side button.

Can a longer timeout drain the iPhone battery?

While I’ve shown you how to adjust the screen timeout on your iPhone or iPad, leaving your device’s screen on for a long time can affect its battery life significantly. So I don’t recommend screen timeout longer than 2 minutes, not if you have a reason to do so. Besides, longer timeouts sometimes pose a privacy threat.

But as I said, you can always reduce or extend it as you like. Ideally, it’s always better to adjust the screen timeout as the use dictates. That said, many other factors may reduce battery life on your iPhone. Thankfully, there are also many ways around resolving battery drain issues on the iPhone.

The screen timeout feature comes in handy whenever you share your iPhone with your kid or any other person. For kids, it keeps them busy. And for friends, it doesn’t kill the fun of using your iPhone.

Do you find it easy tweaking your timeout setting every time? And how often do you do so? Let me know in the comment section below.

Read more:

How to reset Screen Time Passcode on iPhone
How to Set Communication Limits for Your Child on iPhone or iPad

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Idowu is an avid tech writer and a software surfer who loves covering knowledge gaps in consumer software, including anything related to iPhones. Well, when he's not reading and learning new things, you'll find Idowu losing gallantly on a solid chessboard or virtually on Lichess.