People are just realising iPhone’s ‘5 tap trick’ could save your life – but you need to turn it on first
ALL iPhone owners can activate a clever trick that could save your life in an emergency.
Better still, it only takes a few seconds to turn on forever.
The “five tap” trick works with Apple’s Emergency SOS feature.
It’s designed to make it as easy as possible to get in contact with the emergency responders.
And it works even if you don’t know the local number for emergency services.
What is Emergency SOS?
Apple Emergency SOS lets you quickly make a call to local emergency services.
In some countries, it will also share your location info with them.
It’s also possible to add emergency contacts to your SOS settings.
“After an emergency call ends, your iPhone alerts your emergency contacts with a text message, unless you choose to cancel,” Apple explained.
“Your iPhone sends your current location, and for a period of time after you enter SOS mode, your emergency contacts receive updates when your location changes.”
If you’ve got an iPhone 14, it’s also possible to use Emergency SOS via Satellite to text the emergency services even without phone signal or Wi-Fi.
What is ‘5-tap’ trick?
Normally to start an Emergency SOS on an iPhone 8 or later, you would need to press and hold the side button and one of the volume buttons.
This is easy to forget – and in some situations, might not even be possible.
Once you’ve done that, you would drag the slider to call emergency services – or just continue to hold the buttons down through a countdown.
However, you can also toggle the feature to make an Emergency SOS call by pressing the side button five times.
You can still use the regular method even the ‘5-tap’ trick is activated.
To turn the feature on, go to Settings > Emergency SOS.
Then you’ll want to make sure Call with 5 Button Presses is toggled on.
If you’ve got an iPhone 7 or earlier then by default you’re required to rapidly press the side or top button five times.
Another useful option to set up is Call Quietly.
“Warning alarms, flashes and VoiceOver will be silenced when using ‘Hold and Release’ or ‘5 Button Presses’ to make an emergency call,” Apple explained.
This could be useful in a situation where you want to covertly call Emergency Services.
And on newer iPhone models, you can activate Call After Serious Crash, which will automatically detect when you’ve been in a vehicle accident.