How can I turn off Focus on my iPhone?

If they don’t allow me to remove focus on my phone, and not make me track down my whole family of devices. Then I will switch to Samsung on my next upgrade.

Holy crap. It has to be the most frustrating thing they ever came up with. Why does it allow one person to screw up everyone else’s devices?

Kraig141 wrote:

If they don’t allow me to remove focus on my phone, and not make me track down my whole family of devices. Then I will switch to Samsung on my next upgrade.

You should always buy the tool that best meets your needs. No one reading here I'm this user-to-user forum has any vested interest in what brand of phone you buy. And, Samsung does seem to have resolved the exploding problem.

I’m assuming that by “alarms”, Pattersonj2 means the alerts that they set on their calendar, not the actual alarm. Because that’s what’s happening to me, I have a lot of alerts on my calendar and its completely arbitrary whether they work or not, from one day to the next.

It’s ridiculous.

Okay71 wrote:

I’m assuming that by “alarms”, Pattersonj2 means the alerts that they set on their calendar, not the actual alarm.

I would not assume that at all as they said "It disabled my alarm clock and I have been late for work several times". Most people do not use a calendar alert to wake themselves up.

Myself and many many others have turned everything off, and are still having this issue. Incredibly frustrating that APPLE has not giving a single answer to this problem that I can find and I have been looking for hours. This is honestly ridiculous

[Edited by Moderator]

The responses on this app, supporting its existence, are delusional. The Focus app is a nightmare that can't be controlled - it has cut me off from the outside world, and even though (after 10 years) I own 6 Apple/IOS devices, this app might make me buy an Android phone. Horrible PR and support from Apple.

It goes or I go.

AmadeusJagger wrote:

The responses on this app, supporting its existence, are delusional. The Focus app is a nightmare that can't be controlled - it has cut me off from the outside world, and even though (after 10 years) I own 6 Apple/IOS devices, this app might make me buy an Android phone. Horrible PR and support from Apple.

It goes or I go.

As was said before:

IdrisSeabright wrote:

You should always buy the tool that best meets your needs. No one reading here I'm this user-to-user forum has any vested interest in what brand of phone you buy. And, Samsung does seem to have resolved the exploding problem.

Go ahead. Buy an Android. With that said, If it's turned off,. it does nothing. You can think whatever you want. The reality is, if it is turned off, it is not causing you to miss any calls at all or is cutting you off from the outside world.

If you have it turned on for any reasons or have set it to turn on automatically for any reason, then it will do just that.

We do and it works temporarily. My daughters are all on the same account and nobody lives at home, so finding the offending device isn't always as easy as you may believe. It seems that even IOS updates can enable the share across devices. And it can be any device, like a macbook, iphone, watch.

So when we see the notifications disabled, and we only find that out when someone tells us, then we have to contact everybody and start searching.

I really do not understand the need to have the "share across devices" as an option. Or make a switch that you can disable Focus from sharing from another device. One switch to share and one switch to allowed being shared with.

I see understand the motivation for this functionality. I don’t think it would be a bad thing, if properly implemented.

As I see it, Apple botched the implementation so badly, we’ve gotten to here. This smacks of the “We’re Apple — we don’t have to care. They’ll deal with it” (“They” meaning us customers.)

The fact that there is so much friction here, is clear evidence that it’s not as simple as you think. It is clearly not “something they’ll get used to.” So, please don’t rain on some honest venting of frustration with an honestly frustrating piece of software. Hopefully someone at Apple will see this someday at take action.

Sounds like standard Apple MO.

I expect it’s little more than me not knowing how to use focus, no intention of wasting time with it either as it’s just too troublesome, youth is no longer on my side.

Fortunately I have a £6 alarm clock so I just use the silent switch on my phone when I get home instead of the very useful Do not disturb feature of yore. Then turn off silent mode when I get up, the native alarm clock doesn’t seem to work when phone silenced but I’m sure it used to in previous iOS iterations - I have no need beyond this particular feature.

Bonus: no one is ever notified that focus is being used, or even thinks I know how to use it.

That wasn’t the question. How to disable Focus until Apple fixes the issues. Missed an expected call from my doctor today no thanks to Focus which was OFF, but apparently was not. They shouldn’t put half-baked experimental apps on our devices. Concept was good, in practice, it’s a total fail.

killcondo wrote:

Fortunately I have a £6 alarm clock so I just use the silent switch on my phone when I get home instead of the very useful Do not disturb feature of yore. Then turn off silent mode when I get up, the native alarm clock doesn’t seem to work when phone silenced but I’m sure it used to in previous iOS iterations - I have no need beyond this particular feature.

The mute switch doesn't (and never has) silence the alarm for the built-in Clock app. If that's happening, you've got something wrong with your phone and might want to contact Apple for further assistance.

245s1 wrote:

Focus *****!!!! Get rid of it. Do not disturb or not was good!!!!

Do Not Disturb was so limited as to be almost useless. Focus isn't perfect but, once you take the trouble to learn how to use it (and yes, it does have something of a learning curve) it can be very, very useful and powerful.

This has also been a nightmare for me and if you turn it off, it's still ON in actuality and my phone suppresses texts and calls about my patients. I have to turn my phone off and back on to get notifications again even though it says focus is off!!! This is the only way I've found to actually get it to go away. Despise this feature. There needs to be an update that allows you to disable it permanently. Good idea in theory and horrible in practice.

I did what they said and disabled all of focus and right after, still had a missed call that did not ring through. This is the worse update. I wish I never would have updated my phone. But news articles were saying this was a very important update. I hate it. Maybe I need to dump apple.