How To Prevent Your IPhone Screen From Turning Off Automatically

Learn how to stop your iPhone display from automatically dimming, locking, or turning off so it stays awake even if you don’t touch the screen.

For optimal battery savings and security, you typically want your iPhone to lock automatically when it sits idle after a set period of time, just in case you leave it unlocked and unattended somewhere.

On the other hand, there are times when you don’t want your iPhone to auto-lock. The good news is there are a few iOS settings that can stop it from happening.

Why would you turn Auto-Lock off?

Although most people want Auto-Lock turned on because it helps conserve power and prevents nosy people from finding your unlocked device and going through your stuff, some might opt to prevent their device from locking automatically for various reasons.

One of the most common reasons has to do with AirPlay mirroring. During AirPlay, you don’t want your iPhone or iPad to automatically turn off after a minute, as this will interrupt the flow, forcing you to unlock your device again and restart the AirPlay stream.

Another reason to disable Auto-Lock is if you read a lot of books or websites on your device and hate when your display’s backlight always goes dim on you while you’re in the middle of trying to read.

Plus, while uploading many files to Google Drive or Dropbox, you might want to keep the iPhone unlocked, as locking it can pause the upload or cause it to fail.

Overall, the need to prevent your iPhone or iPad screen from turning off automatically comes down to a limited audience of people based on how the device is being used.

Most iPhone users can benefit from Auto-Lock. So, unless you’re a part of that limited pool, we recommend setting the feature to a designated time limit. This ensures you get the best battery life and device security.

With that said, no matter your use case, preventing your screen from automatically turning off is a simple task.

Stop your iPhone screen from turning off

Follow these three settings to ensure this.

Turn off Auto-Lock

1. Open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad and tap Display & Brightness.
2. Tap Auto-Lock.
3. Choose Never to prevent your iPhone screen from dimming and locking.

You can also choose options like 5 minutes to extend the auto-lock time.

When Never is chosen from the list, your device screen won’t turn off automatically after any period of time; it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, whether you’re in an app, staring at your Home Screen, or streaming via AirPlay.

Related: How to fix grayed out Auto-Lock setting on iPhone

Don’t turn on Low Power Mode

Irrespective of the option you choose in step 3 above, when your iPhone is in Low Power Mode, it’ll always automatically lock the screen after 30 seconds of inactivity. This is to prevent battery drainage, and you can’t change this.

So, when you want to prevent your iPhone display from sleeping, make sure not to enable Low Power Mode from Settings > Battery or from Control Center.

Turn off Attention Aware Features

When the toggle for Attention Aware Features is enabled, regardless of the Auto-Lock setting (30 seconds to 5 minutes), your iPhone will dim and lock the display if it notices that it doesn’t have your attention; that is, you aren’t looking at your iPhone.

So, to prevent the screen of your iPhone with Face ID from dimming and locking automatically, go to the Settings app > Face ID & Passcode and turn off Attention Aware Features.

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