How to use Guided Access on iPhone

Guided Access for iPhone is a useful tool for those who want to focus on the task at hand, as well as for parents.

It’s easy these days to get distracted by the various beeps, bloops, dings, and swooshes coming off your phone. If you’re trying to stay on task or just want to watch a movie without interruption, the Guided Access feature on iPhone can come in handy. It’s also a good parental control tool if you ever decide to leave your phone to a child.

Put simply, this feature limits the phone to just a single app and even lets you decide which features of that app work while Guided Access is actively running. It’s sort of like a customized do not disturb mode that helps you focus on what you’re doing without being tempted to play your mobile game because you’re making some coins or the Instagram followers and checked likes when you should work or study. With Guided Access, parents can prevent young children from accessing everything on their personal devices except the app they are allowed to use for Screen Time. You can set up a Guided Access profile in advance and then start a session at any time.

Using Guided Access is easy with any of the best iPhones from iPhone X and up, including the iPhone 14. Only a few steps are required.

Go to settings, Accessibilityand scroll down to Guided Access.
Enable Guided Access From Moving the slider to the right until it turns green.
Hire Passcode for Guided Access. You can use your iPhone passcode if you want something easy to remember, or even use Face ID.
Hire time limit If desired, selection of a desired sound to play and audible indication of the time remaining in the session.
You can choose to rotate that access shortcut on or off while a Guided Access session is in progress. When it’s on, triple-clicking the side button brings up the Accessibility shortcut.
You can also customize the Show auto lock to change the time that elapses before iPhone automatically locks while you’re in the middle of a Guided Access session from 30 seconds to 15 minutes or never.
Once these parameters are set, Open the application you want to use during a Guided Access session.
Triple-tap the button to the right of the phone and select from the pop-up window Guided Access.
You can draw a circle around the areas of the app you want to disable, then select Start in the top right and those areas will be shaded and unusable.
Under optionsaccessed at the bottom left, you can also do things like lock the volume button and set time limits from a minute to a 24-hour period.
The app is now the only one that can be accessed up to you Disable Guided Access or the deadline has expired. If you’ve selected an area to disable (e.g. the top right corner where you can switch profiles in the Netflix app), that particular feature will also not be available in the selected app.
To disable Guided Access, Tap the right button three times Disable Guided Access again and enter your six-digit passcode.

Why should you use Guided Access? First, Guided Access is a great way to focus on a task at hand. For example, if you’re working on a document or reading an eBook on your iPhone and don’t want to be disturbed, you can turn on Guided Access. The phone then becomes an e-reader, so to speak. You won’t know about incoming social media tags or notifications, emails, mobile game app rewards, phone calls, or other distractions.

Second, as mentioned earlier, Guided Access is useful for parents who give their iPhone to a child from time to time to keep them occupied for a short time. That way, they can’t dig around and access private information. Young children could easily (and accidentally) send a message, view inappropriate content, or even erase important information from your device. This is one of the reasons why it is a good idea to always back up your iPhone to iTunes or any other source. But Guided Access can help prevent this from happening in the first place.

In my screenshot above, I ran Guided Access on the Netflix app and circled the profile icon in the top right. This would allow a child to select and watch an approved movie from their child profile while you attend to an important phone call, for example, but not allow them to switch to your adult profiles to access content that is not age appropriate.

Guided Access comes in handy in a number of ways, and with a little setup and a few clicks you can easily toggle it on and off.