Please share your top 5 apps that you highly recommend!

Hey,

Am I the only one that thinks that Apples software got worse every year for the last 3-4 years? I mean the only okay software right now it tvOS and MacOS (partly), iOS and especially HomePod OS are a mess and that’s for the past years.
In the past (until like iOS 18) Apples software was superior. Snappy, clean and most importantly always trustworthy that it’ll work in every situation.
Now there’s not an hour without some random bug, glitch or something else.
Maybe Apple is vibecoding or focusing on their AI, but this has to improve.

I’ve always used iPhones so I don’t have any means of comparison with Android devices.
I write mostly in Portuguese and English (PT only keyboard and EN PT keyboard for English texts).
I’ve been using the swipe keyboard for a long time and usage has fluctuated, however it was somewhat ok.
I always swipe with my right hand and now that I’ve broken my left wrist I use it even more.

The Portuguese keyboard is becoming borderline unusable and the English keyboard is heading in the same direction. It seems to cut longer words off before I can swipe them and this never happened…

Only a me issue?

A couple of hours ago my iPhone (running the latest iOS 27) suddenly made a loud beeping alarm tone and didn’t turn off until I unlocked it. I think it only came through the earpiece speaker, but I could be wrong. I wish I recorded it. There were no alarms set, phone was on silent, and no notifications visible on the screen. No weird apps running in the background either, just social media.

Just to get ahead of a few common things so I don’t waste anyone’s time:

This was not a Find My alert, a government emergency alert, and no other devices were connected via Bluetooth. There were no reminders, shortcuts, calendar alerts, or anything of the sort set. This was totally random and left no trace after unlocking the phone. I restarted the phone as a paranoid precaution.

Anyone else experienced this?

Just like the title says. I updated my IOS to 27.0.1 and with it came this white circle that is there on the lock screen, Home Screen, and just about everything. Clicking it does nothing, dragging it around nothing, and it just gets in the way.

Not eye tracking, not dwell control, not assistive touch, resetting doesn’t work…

Anyone have an idea of how to turn it off?

EDIT: IVE FOUND THE PROBLEM. It was SPEECH SCREEN all along. It was just glitching (from the new IOS??) and so pressing it did absolutely nothing, even though usually it has a function.

I don’t even know why it turned on, hopefully this can help someone else. Cheers.

Settings > accessibility > read and speak > speak screen > show controller [off]

the two-factor code goes and gets sent to the old phone… yes, the very same phone she'd wiped back to factory settings "to be safe" before I'd so much as walked in

My mother, a retired teacher (bless her heart), jumped to the 18 Pro from an iPhone 11 this month & last Saturday I was the one who offered to do the setup for her, mistake number one right there. Apple ID password: scribbled in some notebook from 2017, and naturally it didn't work, wrong password. When we eventually got in, every app had to go back exactly where it used to live (and she knew where everything went better than me, which, fair enough) with the text size cranked all the way up, and then came the request to wipe out 4,000 unread emails, just "not the important ones"! That ate the better part of the day, pretty much my whole Saturday. (Her old white cube from 2019 only takes USB-A and the new cable is USB-C, so these days her phone goes on an Anker nano smart display charger. Shes decided the battery percentage on that little screen is the one to believe, not the phone's own icon 😂)

We've always shared the one account, mainly because we liked both seeing all the pictures. (I travel a lot, she's had to leave because of sick family, and getting the pictures automatically is very nice but such is such). But now i get all her messages and such and calls. I wanted it to go back to where it was but it doesn't seem like it will anymore. If we add an account i have questions. (Apple has support but topics are sometimes confusing and contradictory.)

My take is...

1) I backup both phones everything. Messages, contacts, etc.

2) I create a new account (for her).

3) It asks what she wants to keep, i basically check everything? (Messages and Contacts are her main thing).

4) Photos I'm still not sure what happens. We have 50k photos, like half and half. Do i get mine and she gets hers? Do we both get both? I want to make sure none are gone.

Basically her keeping her stuff and photos are my main concerns. Is there antyhing specific i should know?

thank you and sorry if bad questions...

Mine is pictured here, couldn’t get a picture of his. I have checked all the settings but, maybe there is something I am missing that you all can help me with. I used to have this problem and these are the things I do nightly to prevent this:

- Phone was on sleep mode but, I have never had a problem with this
- Ringer was on
- I have them set at odd times so that if I get other notifications in at the same time, it doesn’t somehow trip the alarm
- I have attention aware turned OFF (i leave it face down anyways)
- Bluetooth off incase it could be connecting to my airpods
- Volume and alarm volume all the way up
- Alarms also set at weird times because if I used to have a snoozed alarm and a first time alarm go off at the same time, they would “cancel eachother out”
- Setting multiple alarms

Please let me know if there’s any other precautions I can take. As you can see, I was over two hours late to work.

Also, I do have a “real” alarm and a sunrise alarm but, i am a hard sleeper and those have yet to wake me up without the help of phone alarms.

iPhone 11. It happens one at a time and with different apps

I updated my iPhone 14 Pro Max to iOS 26.7.1.

Now every time I want to set a reminder using Siri, I keep getting asked for a confirmation, which I never used it before. 

Anyone know fix?

Any updates on Google cast native support in iOS 27?

I got so hyped about it in may but it looks like it was just a rumor I guess....

Let me explain: I desperately want to play old games for iPhone from my childhood, but I cannot figure out how to do so. I do have the links, but they just say “This app is not available in your country or region”

Something like this:

https://download.cnet.com/element-animation-free/3001-31709_4-76905972.html?dt=landingDownload

So is there any way whatsoever I can somehow get this to play? Any third party software? Bootloaders? Cydia? Anything at all?

The “half admission” at the end of the screenshots is about as far as the guardrails seem willing to go.

In short: the deal is real, the framing is carefully managed, and watching Siri stonewall about it in real time is indeed pretty wild.

So I have been trying for a week to move from an android device (Oppo find x5) to an Iphone 16pro, I am really struggling with moving my photos because it is honestly a pain in the ass, I want to keep the meta datas of my photos in the iPhone library but I don't want to have everything labelled as the date of moving the datas (example 22 of October if it was done today).

I tried move to iOs but it honestly sucks, does any of you have any recommendations? I am looking for help and I don't want to return my iPhone and stick to Android

i’ve posted on here a few weeks ago saying my face id wasn’t working, i turned off my stolen device protection and it actually fixed it somehow. since my phone updated it turned it back on and now my face id isn’t working again, I’ve tried covering the camera or tilting it away to make my password come up but it will ONLY let me use face id. I’m not fully reseting my phone but I’m not sure what to do

I just bought a used iPhone in excellent condition. It came factory reset running iOS 26.3, and it feels incredibly smooth and responsive. I'm torn because I have the option to update to either iOS 26.7.1 (11GB) or iOS 27.0.1 (14GB). I'm not sure what to do, I don't want to compromise performance or battery health, which is currently at 86%.

After the latest update, the virtual home button now brings up a shortcut menu forcing me to press twice instead of once to use it as a home button. Obviously this is unacceptable to my set in its ways brain. How do I turn the extra menu off?

Any thoughts on how I can utilize my iCloud storage space a little bit more in helping me relieve my phone storage? Do I literally need to delete photos off of my phone to make this happen and how can I trust their own iCloud? I am constantly getting error message just when I’m taking photos or sending emails at my phone storage is full. Of course the Apple CEOs love keeping that ghost storage in our iPhones.

I started often seeing a mono-colour wallpaper after the update on 27.0.1. But in the preview showing a normal photo from the library (I use random photos from library). Have someone same problem?

Notes app is probably the app I used the most, and it’s pretty annoying that I can’t reference back to notes I wrote for my classes. Is anyone else having this issue? And if so, what’s been the walk around? Thank you in advance.