The IT Nerd

There’s a new feature in iOS 11 called Emergency SOS. The intent of this feature is to ensure that you can call emergency services if you cannot safely dial 9-1-1, 9-9-9, or whatever your emergency number is. But since iOS 11 has appeared, it’s created a lot of noise and controversy. Take for example this Tweet from the Toronto Police Service:

New iOS Operating System 911 feature
Please DO NOT try it out~Toronto Police receiving many test calls that tie up our 911 lines #iOS11 ^sk pic.twitter.com/hlFUCwGi8e

— Toronto Police (@TorontoPolice) September 20, 2017

Clearly some people are not using this feature as it was intended. That’s a #fail.

The purpose of this article is to explain what this feature is and how it works. But to do that, let me go back to and explain where this feature came from because it isn’t a new feature. Apple first introduced this SOS feature in iOS 10.2. That likely came from requests from India to meet India Department of Telecommunications requirements for this feature. Since then this feature made its next appearance on watchOS last year. Now we’re seeing it on the iPhone. Here’s how it works.

First of all, it’s always on and you cannot turn it off. But you can change how it works. By default, when you press the sleep/wake button on the iPhone five times on a device running iOS 11, it brings up a slider menu that allows you to quickly slide a finger against the screen to place the emergency call. That’s designed to stop you from somehow activating this feature accidentally. However, you can change this behavior to make it completely automatic. Here’s how:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Scroll down to “Emergency SOS.”
3. Toggle on “Auto Call.”

What this will do is dial emergency services after a three second countdown that gives you enough time to cancel the call if it’s placed accidentally. This matches the behavior of the Apple Watch.

Now you can also send a text message or iMessage to people that you define as emergency contacts who will get a message from you and it will include your location. Emergency contacts can be set up in the Health app by doing the following:

1. Open the Health app.
2. Choose Medical ID.
3. Select “Edit” in the top right corner.
4. Scroll down to the Emergency Contacts section.
5. Tap the “+” button to add an emergency contact.
6. Repeat step 5 to add additional contacts.

There’s one other thing that this feature will do. It will temporarily disable TouchID if you actually make an emergency call. But if you cancel dialing emergency services, TouchID still gets disabled. In either case, you will need to enter a valid passcode to re-enable TouchID. This is handy if you want to discreetly disable TouchID as it leaves no visual indication that this has been done.

I should also note that when the iPhone X comes out, this feature will work a little bit differently. Emergency SOS will be activated by pressing the side button and the volume up button simultaneously, rather than pressing the side button five times. It will also disable FaceID since the iPhone X will not come with TouchID.

This is a great safety feature and I encourage you to read this Apple support document for the Apple Watch, and this Apple support document for the iPhone to get more information on this key feature. Just don’t needlessly try it out. Trust me. It will work if God forbid you need it and emergency services have better things to do than answer your test call.

Apple will be releasing the latest version of iOS which is iOS 11 on September 19th. Likely at 1PM EST. But before you upgrade, here’s some tips on what you might want to do before you pull that trigger:

1. Update your Apps: Make sure that all your apps are up to date before upgrading by opening the AppStore app and seeing if any updates are required. This is important because you need to make sure they are all 64-bit versions as iOS 11 has no support for 32-bit apps. After you do that, you still need to check if you have any 32-bit apps by doing this:

1. Launch the Settings app from your Home screen
2. Tap General
3. Tap About
4. Tap Applications

Here you will be given a list of the applications that are still 32-bit. These are the apps that maybe in danger of not working on iOS 11. If you tap on Applications, and no list of apps shows up, it means you don’t have any apps that are 32-bit.

2. Dump any uneeded photos, videos or apps: iOS updates tend to need a fair amount of free space to allow for a successful installation. Thus if you have anything less than 5GB of free space, consider deleting unused apps or photos/videos. In terms of the photos and videos you want to keep, you can move them to the cloud or a computer so that they’re safely stored without taking up space on your iPhone. I personally use iCloud myself, but Google Photos is another option.

3. Backup your iDevice: If you value the data on your iDevice, backing it up is a must. You have two options for backing up your iDevice: iCloud or iTunes. Follow this guide to backing up your iPhone using iCloud or iTunes.

At this point you should be good to go to upgrade. Key word being SHOULD. Upgrading an operating system isn’t a trivial process. But if you take these steps beforehand, you should reduce the risk of any issues that you might encounter.

Tomorrow, Apple is expected to announce among other items, the ship date for their latest OS which is macOS High Sierra. But before you upgrade, here’s some tips on what you might want to do before you pull that trigger.

1. Don’t Upgrade… At least not yet: macOS High Sierra brings a brand new file system called APFS to the table as well as the fact that Microsoft has warned that Office may not work with High Sierra. There’s likely other things out there that may be problematic such as bugs like the ones that Apple had with WiFi a few years back or other incompatibilities that nobody knows about. Thus you might want to wait to upgrade until the dust settles from the early adopters finding all the problems that exist.
2. If You Must Upgrade, Make A Backup: Needless to say, making a backup of your current setup is vital before upgrading. That way you have a way to go back to where you were if things don’t work out. There’s plenty of backup solutions out there from Apple’s own Time Machine to third party utilities such as Carbon Copy Cloner that can be used for this purpose.
3. Make Sure Your Apps Are Compatible With High Sierra: Seeing a Microsoft is out there saying that Office compatibility with High Sierra is sketchy at best, it would serve you well to check this site to see if the rest of the apps on your Mac may have issues and what you can do about it.
4. Upgrade Your Software BEFORE You Upgrade: You should ensure that all your application software is up to date before you pull the trigger on upgrading. Ditto for the current version of macOS that you’re using. That will reduce the risk that something might go sideways during the upgrade.
5. Run A Disk Utility BEFORE You Upgrade: The last thing I would do is boot of the Recovery Partition and run Disk Utility to verify the volume that you plan to install the upgrade on. It likely wouldn’t hurt to do a permission repair as well. Alternately you can run a third party utility such as DiskWarrior to do the same thing.

At this point you should be good to go. Key word being SHOULD. Upgrading an operating system isn’t a trivial process. But if you take these steps beforehand, you should reduce the risk of any issues. Or you can take my first suggestion which is to wait a bit. Then follow the rest of my advice.

Something that I come across from time to time are people who insist of force quitting iOS apps which is done by double clicking the home button, and then swiping the app or apps that they want to force quit. The word on the street is that you save your battery life, RAM and CPU power by doing so. But is that true or not? The answer is perhaps a bit more nuanced than a simple yes or now answer. Let’s start discussing this by looking at what Apple says in this document:

When you double-click the Home button, your recently used apps appear. The apps aren’t open, but they’re in standby mode to help you navigate and multitask. You should force an app to close only when it’s unresponsive.

In other words, the apps that are in the background aren’t consuming that much RAM and they aren’t using any CPU or battery life. And the thing is, iOS is exceptionally good at making sure that these apps behave. In fact, it actually takes more CPU and battery power to force quit and restart an app than it does to simply leave it there. Thus you shouldn’t force quit an app unless it’s crashed or something.

Now there is one scenario where I can see where that you might save some CPU and battery power by force quitting an app. It is possible that an app that uses location services functionality that is set to always active may not be put into standby as it is periodically polling for your (or more accurately the iPhone’s) location. Thus logic suggests that force quitting one of these apps may actually save you battery life if you don’t need the functionality that the app provides.

Now you’re likely wondering what I do. I will admit to force quitting apps like Garmin Connect, Runtastic Pro among other fitness apps that I have on my iPhone for the reasons that I stated above. But most of my other apps like Maps, Calendar and the like are always running. I can’t say if that makes a difference or not and perhaps someone should take a look at this empirically to see what the truth is. In the meantime the question of whether you should force quit an app on the iOS platform is not a yes or no answer. At least not at the present time.

A few days ago, I noticed that the battery life on my Apple Watch took a significant nosedive. Instead of lasting about two days between charges, it would be requiring a recharge at about 9PM at night. Given that I wake up at 6AM, that wasn’t good. Clearly there was a problem, but I needed to figure out if it was software or hardware as if if it is the latter, I would have to make an appointment with the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store. Here’s how I went about isolating the problem:

1. Reboot the Apple Watch: It sounds simple, and it is. Sometimes a simple reboot will work. So what I did was I rebooted by pressing and holding the side button and crown at the same time until the screen went blank and the white Apple logo appeared. I did it first thing in the morning so I knew that I was starting out with a fully charged Apple Watch. Then every couple of hours I would note how much battery life I had left by swiping up from the bottom to see control center. I also noted how much battery life I had left at the end of the day. In my case, by the end I would usually have something between 60% and 70% battery life depending on what I was doing that day. For example, if I was out for a ride on my bike, I would be closer to the 60% mark in terms of battery life. In my case, rebooting didn’t work as I was still noticing excessive draining of the battery. Thus, on to step 2.
2. Un-pair the Apple Watch from your iPhone and re-pair: What this process does is basically reset your Apple Watch from a software perspective. The reason why you would want to do this is that maybe there’s some piece of software that is draining the battery excessively. Thus by doing this, you get the option of starting out with a virgin Apple Watch from a software perspective. Then you can add back all your Apple Watch apps until you find the one that is causing your problem. Or you can simply add them all back and see if things stabilize. I would recommend that you try the former for best results. Though I will admit that it is time consuming. Apple has a document for un-pairing your Apple Watch from your iPhone here. Now you can pair your Apple Watch using these instructions from Apple and I would recommend setting it up as a new watch rather than using a backup so that you avoid the possibility that you are reintroducing a problem that was part of a backup. In my case, doing this process seems to have worked. At least so far. I will continue to monitor this to ensure that it stays “fixed.” Warning: You’ll need around an hour to do this and if you have any credit or debit cards added to the Apple Watch to use with Apple Pay, you’ll need to add those back as well.
3. Make an appointment with the Genius Bar: Let’s pretend that neither of the above solved my issue. At this point I have eliminated most of the possible software causes and I am left with a hardware issue. That means a trip to the Genius Bar. When you go, you need to make sure that you tell the Genius that you’ve done the above and be prepared to explain it in detail. That way your time at the Genius Bar is minimized and they can either repair or more likely replace the Apple Watch in short order (assuming it is under warranty or AppleCare).

Do you have any other tips for solving battery drain problems with the Apple Watch? If so, please leave a comment below and share your tips.

This morning, I had this pop up on the screen of my iPhone 7 Plus:

I had no idea what this was and there was zero chance I was going to grant access to an application that I didn’t recognize as that’s a excellent way to get pwned by hackers. Thus I clicked “Don’t Allow.” But that got me nowhere as no matter how many times I clicked “Don’t Allow”, the prompt came back.  Thus I was ultimately forced to reboot the iPhone to get rid of this prompt.

My concern was that I had some sort of malware lurking around my phone. So to cover myself, I did two things that I found by searching around the Internet for solutions to this problem, and a third that falls under the category of “just in case.” The first thing that I did comes via this Apple Discussion Boards post:

1. Close Safari completely from the multitasking window by double clicking the Home button and swiping up the Safari preview pane until it disappears from the screen.
2. Go to Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data.
3. Do a forced restart of the iPhone.

It made sense to do this as I was thinking that maybe I had picked up some drive by malware via browsing the web that was responsible for this. Thus this would clear it up.

The second thing that I did came from this Reddit post:

1. Turn off all notifications for Twitter in iOS’s settings app.
2. Completely uninstall Twitter.
3. Sign out of iOS’s Twitter in the Settings app.
4. Reinstall Twitter.
5. When you open Twitter, it’ll ask for notification permission. Grant it.

Doing this makes sense as it clears the Twitter app and the data along with it and resets all the permissions too. Now the Reddit post references jailbreaking. I do not jailbreak my phones as that’s another great way to get pwned by hackers. Thus whatever this issue is, it affects non-jailbroken devices as well.

Finally, as an security precaution, I will be changing the password to my Twitter accounts. That way if I have been somehow pwned, at least I will maintain control of my Twitter account.

It still leaves me with this question. What is this “exited?” app and why does it want access to my Twitter accounts? Is this perhaps a bug related to the Twitter app that’s been around for a while (some web results on this go back to 2012), or is it something more sinister? I’d love to know the answer to that question. If you have any feedback on this, please leave a comment below. In the meantime, I will be watching my iPhone carefully to see if this comes back.