iOS 18 is finally here with a bunch of new settings that are important to optimize for your privacy and battery life. And to make things more interesting, Apple hit the shuffle button in iOS 18’s settings app. So things are in different places than they used to be. But don’t worry. In this guide, we’ll walk you through all the settings to turn off in iOS 18.
Let’s dive in.
Let’s start by opening the Settings app and go into Battery. Tap on Charging. Now let’s talk about Charge Limit.
The first thing to understand is that lithium ion batteries like the one in your phone don’t like to be charged all the way to 100%. And if you do charge it to 100%, they don’t like to stay there for too long because that can decrease your battery’s longevity. In the past, Apple built Optimized Battery Charging where your iPhone would charge all the way to 80% overnight and then try to time it so that when you woke up, the battery was at 100%. But that never really worked as well as Apple had hoped. So they built in a Charge Limit slider. If you have good battery life and you wanna maximize your iPhone battery’s longevity, instead of using Optimized Battery Charging, take the Charge Limit slider and drag it down to 90%. You’ll still have more than enough battery to make it through your day and you’ll keep your iPhone battery healthy for as long as possible.
And pro tip, remember you turned this setting on, especially when your friends come to you complaining that their iPhone only charges to 80% or 90%, you can say, it’s not broken, you just turned Charge Limit on.
Next, let’s tap Back to battery and then Back to the main page of the Settings app and tap on your name at the top of the screen. Next, tap Personal Information and tap Communication Preferences. Turn off the switches on this screen to cut down on the number of emails you get every day.
Let’s tap Back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, Back again, then tap on Subscriptions. Here, take a look through subscription list and make sure you’re not paying for any subscriptions you don’t need to be paying for. To cancel any active subscription, just tap on the subscription and then tap Cancel Subscription. The good thing about this is that you get to keep all the time that you’ve already paid for. It’s just not going to renew at the beginning of the next month. You can always reactivate the subscription. These companies make it easy for you to give them your money.
Next setting, tap Back to subscriptions, Back to Apple Account, Back to the main page of the Settings app, then tap Cellular and tap on Cellular Data Options. Tap Voice & Data. If you don’t have a great 5G signal everywhere you go, tap LTE. It might actually be faster, true story. And I guarantee you will get better battery life. And while you’re here, make sure to turn off the switch next to 5G standalone. There is no reason not to use 4G LTE if it’s available.
Let’s tap Back to return to the previous menu, and then tap on Data Mode. Unless you have terrible wifi, stay away from Allow More Data on 5G. Standard is a pretty good option, but Low Data Mode is one of my favorite hidden sleeper settings on iPhone. It’s kind of a substitute for Low Power Mode. It shuts down some of the most battery intensive things that happen in the background of your iPhone, and just waits to do them until you’re connected to wifi again, which is a win across the board.
Last tip for the cellular section of settings, tap Back and tap Back again. Sscroll down to iCloud Backup. Unless you never connect to wifi, there is no reason to have this switch turned on because these giant file sizes, both burning through your battery and your high speed data cap. And if you go over that data cap, even with a limited data, your plan is going to slow down.
The next feature you should turn off on iOS 18 is hidden in Wi-Fi setting. So let’s go to wifi, good segue. Go Back to the main Settings page, and then tap on Wi-Fi. Scroll all the way to the bottom and you have to wait a second, and then tap on Ask to Join Networks. I recommend turning this off because random wifi networks are one of the easiest ways a hacker can spy on you and steal your information, using what’s called a man in the middle attack. We’re not going to get into that, but suffice to say that if you’re at Starbucks, it’s safe to use Starbucks wifi, but it’s not safe to use some random network called Netgear or something like that at Dave’s Coffee Shop, because who knows who’s in charge of that?
Tap back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and go back to the main Settings page, and scroll all the way to the bottom and tap on App Store. There are a couple important settings in here that are going to make your life easier.
First, let’s turn off the switch next to App Downloads, so that when you download an app on your iPad, it doesn’t automatically show up on your iPhone and vice versa. This helps keep your devices organized. Typically, I don’t want things appearing everywhere. Then scroll down to Video Autoplay. Tap on that to open it up and just turn this off, so that when you’re using the App Store app, your iPhone doesn’t start randomly playing videos that drain your battery life. And tap back to app store page and make sure the switch next to In-App Ratings & Reviews is turned off. This just makes your life a little bit easier because now an app doesn’t open up and immediately ask you to give a five-star review. You could do that if you want to. I don’t want to be forced into it.
Next, let’s take a look at the camera settings you should turn off in iOS 18. Let’s tap Back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen to go to the main Settings page. Scroll up to Camera and tap on it. If you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see a setting called Prioritize Faster Shooting. When this is on, your iPhone intelligently adapt image quality when rapidly pressing the shutter. I recommend that you turn this off. Maybe you’re taking a lot of quick shots at your son’s football game to capture the action. The problem with this setting is that it sacrifices image quality for speed. So when you go to zoom in on your son’s awesome catch, if this setting is turned on, you’re going to have a less high quality photo to work with. So in my opinion, I always want the photos that I take with my iPhone to be as high quality as possible. I recommend turning it off.
One more camera setting to talk about. Scroll up to Formats and tap on it. Scroll down and turn off Apple ProRes, unless you really know what you’re doing and are okay using all the space on your iPhone to take one video.
Next up, let’s tap Back to camera in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and go back to the main page of Settings. Then tap to open up Sounds & Haptics. Scroll all the way to the bottom, then tap on Keyboard Feedback. There are two settings here: Sound and Haptic. First off, turn off Sound, please, for everybody else. I hate those keyboard sounds. And haptic are the little buzzes that you feel when you tap on the keyboard. This is okay. Some people like them, some people hate them. I turn them off, saves battery life. Pretty much all the settings we talk about in this guide save battery life.
Tap Back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and tap to turn off the switch next to Lock Sound. Personally, I don’t need to hear that lock sound.
While we’re here, let’s scroll to the top and I want to discuss briefly Change With Buttons, which is a setting that everyone who owns an iPhone should understand. First off, this switch only has to do with your ringtone and alerts like your alarm clock. When the switch is on, you can use the volume buttons on the side of your phone to adjust the volume of ringtones and your alarm clock when it’s off, and I prefer it to be off. So I’ll tap that switch. You set the volume of your ringtone and your alarm clock on this screen with the slider, but you can still use the volume buttons to control the volume of everything else on your phone. The reason I like to have this switch off is that when I turn down the volume of a podcast audio, for instance, I don’t want my alarm clock volume also going down so that I don’t wake up tomorrow morning. This is kind of a safety feature for me.
Next, a quick detour to notifications. So tap Back to go to the main page of Settings and then tap on Notifications. Next, tap on Screen Sharing and turn off Allow Notifications. This will prevent your text messages appearing on the screen when you are doing something productive on your iPhone.
Next, let’s head to display settings. Tap Back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and back again to the main page of Settings. Tap on Display & Brightness, then scroll down and tap on Always on Display. I love always on display because it doesn’t really affect your battery life that much because the truth is it’s not actually always on. Your iPhone intelligently turns it off if your phone is, for instance, facedown on the table or if it’s in your pocket. But I don’t like the way it comes out of the box. I recommend turning off Show Wallpaper because the whole point of Always on Display for me is that it shows me useful information at a glance, not to show me a crappier version of my wallpaper.
Next, let’s tap Back to return to the main page of Settings and discuss one of the most important sections of this guide, privacy, which if we scroll down, we will find with the hand tap on Privacy & Security.
First things first, tap Tracking and turn off the switch at the top next to Allow Apps to Request to Track. This is another quality of life setting.
Tap Back to return to the main page of Privacy & Security and there are two of the most important things on your phone, your photos and your contacts. What happens when you give an app access to all of your photos or contacts? Well, it opens the floodgates and allows that app to do whatever the heck it wants to with all of that information. TikTok pre-uploads your photos to their servers to make it faster to use, but really it’s just sending all your photos to China. So let’s scroll down to Photos and tap on that. And then scroll all the way down and check out the settings for TikTok. I’ll tap on that and TikTok currently has full access to all of the photos on my phone. I don’t want that. So I can choose Limited Access and then choose which photos or videos I want to give TikTok access to or just choose None, which is the right choice for you if you’re not making TikToks and uploading them.
Let’s tap Back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen to return to the main page of Privacy & Security and scroll all the way to the bottom and let’s open Analytics & Improvements. Make sure that all the switches on this page are turned off. Let’s let Apple improve their own products.
Tap Back again in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and tap Apple Advertising and turn off the switch next to Personalized Ads.
Now let’s deal with GPS. Tap Back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, scroll all the way to the top and tap on Location Services. Go through the list on this screen. Watch out for anything that says Always because that means an app would have access to your location all the time, even when you’re not using the app. We don’t want that. It’s a big battery drainer too. Just keep zipping through here and tap on System Services. There are some new options in here, but the only ones I recommend keeping on are Compass Calibration, Emergency Calls & SOS, Find My iPhone, Satellite Connection, and Share My Location. Then as we scroll down to the bottom on this screen, turn off all the switches under Product Improvement.
Let’s tap Back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, Back again and Back to the main page of Settings. Scroll up just a bit and tap on Search. Tap the switch next to Improved Search to turn it off. This stops Apple from collecting a list of the things that you search for on your iPhone. And by default, they’re really collecting a lot of data here that you might not want them to have.
Next up is setting you’ll find refreshing. Tap Back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen to return to the main page of Settings, scroll up just a bit, tap on General and then scroll down to Background App Refresh and tap on it. Background App Refresh allows apps to download new content in the background when you’re not using those apps. So it’s pretty simple concept, but it’s a battery drainer. So tap on Background App Refresh at the top and then choose either Off or Wi-Fi. Don’t choose Cellular Data because it will drain your battery.
Tap Back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, Back again, and then Back one more time to the main page of Settings and then scroll down to Mail. Oh wait, mail’s gone, along with a whole lot of other settings. Where have they gone? Well, into the apps menu. Apple relegated a lot of the apps that ship with your iPhone to this section of settings. Why? Some people are saying so they don’t get sued by the EU quite as much. Let’s go to Mail and you can use the little alphabet on the right side. Just press and hold your finger on it and drag down to the M and then tap on Mail. Go into Mail Accounts and then Fetch New Data and make sure that Push is turned off at the top.
When Push is turned on, an Apple lead genius told me this your iPhone maintains a connection to an email server asking is there mail, is there mail, is there mail, is there mail, is there mail. With Fetch, you decide how often your iPhone checks to see if there’s new mail. Obviously, it saves a lot of battery life. So at the bottom of this screen, just make sure that you choose an interval that works for you like every 15 minutes. This just means that the mail app is going to check for new mail every 15 minutes or whenever you open the mail app. Most people will never notice a difference.
Next, let’s tap Back to Accounts, Back to Mail, Back to Apps, and then look for that familiar green icon down in Messages. Tap on that, then scroll all the way to the bottom and check out Low Quality Image Mode. Make sure that this switch is turned off. We want to send images in full, beautiful quality. So make sure the switch is off to turn full quality on.
Tap Back to Apps in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and let’s go down to Photos with a silent P, Photos. Tap on that, scroll down to Show Hidden Album. Make sure that this switch is turned off. Otherwise, it’s not really all that hidden.
Tap Back to Apps and go down to Safari, tap on that. Make sure Preload Top Hit is turned off. Whenever you do a Google search on your phone, Safari goes ahead and preloads the top result because it thinks that’s the one you’re going to click on, but that uses battery life and data and it’s just not necessary most of the time, unless you always click on the first result and then go ahead.
Scroll down all the way down on this screen to Advanced. Tap on Advanced, turn off the switch next to Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement, a setting that Apple keeps bearing farther within the settings app. When Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement is turned off, it means not that it’s not private, it means that there’s no ad measurement, not the privacy preserving kind. So it’s actually more secure to have this turned off than to leave it turned on. It’s a little bit ambiguously worded, but that’s what we’re here for. Everything else in here though, leave it the way it is, unless you want your websites to break on you.
Thank you very much for reading this article.