iPhones that do not have the home button i.e., the ones with the new bezel-less design all support Tap to wake. It’s a feature that was recently added to iOS but isn’t supported on all devices that can run iOS 13. It’s useful for when you want to look at your screen but don’t want to pick up your phone and click the wake button. It does tend to consume more battery and in some cases, you might even wake the screen by accident. If you don’t like the feature, you can disable it. Here’s how.
Open the Settings app on your iPhone and tap on Accessibility and then tap on Touch.
Go through the options on the Touch screen and you will find a switch called ‘Tap to Wake’. Turn it Off and tap to wake will be disabled on the iPhone.
Tap to Wake on the iPhone works with a single tap. On non-iOS phones i.e. Android phones that support the feature, it normally takes two taps on the screen to wake it. It makes it less likely to accidentally wake your screen when you don’t mean to. As far as iOS 13 and the newer iPhone models are concerned, a single tap can do the job and there’s no way to change or customize it.
Tap to wake with the newer iPhones also means that the device will start scanning for your face if you have FaceID set up and if it detects you’re looking at the phone, it will unlock it. The feature itself is great but the execution needs to be worked on a bit since iPhones have really good, really fast facial recognition. Since users are unlikely to turn off FaceID, it makes more sense to turn off Tap to Wake. If you aren’t using FaceID though, tap to wake is great for peaking at your screen and also for quickly getting to the passcode screen.
Tap to wake is popular among most iPhone users and those with older iPhone models i.e., ones that still have a Home button look for ways to add the feature to their devices. The only way to do that is to jailbreak the device which is an odd restriction from Apple considering older Android devices can/do support the feature. It’s a lot like 3D touch which can be mimicked with a long-press on the screen but Apple restricted it for certain older devices.
