iPhone 16e unlocks when touching the screen, without pressing the side button.

By Enes Deniz, 30 December, 2025

Forum
iOS and iPadOS
We had exchanged a series of posts in another thread on Face ID earlier, where the OP mentioned Face ID being activated even if the user didn't wish to. Now I've recently upgraded to an iPhone 16e and have a different but possibly related issue. The device unlocks when I touch the screen without pressing the side button. Even a single tap is enough for VoiceOver to begin speaking immediately. I hadn't set up Face ID during initial setup, but when I set it up today, nothing changed, and VoiceOver even started saying things like those mentioned in the thread I referred to above, indicating the camera was trying to detect a face where there was none. By the way, expect some new app entries. There are some great local AI/LLM apps that let you run language models on-device. Some I had come across before buying that iPhone 16e, but had to wait for the new device to try them out on, as my good old SE 2022 wouldn't support them. Another one of them I will probably let you know when the more accessible and stable official 2.0 release is out; I'm currently beta-testing it.

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Comments

By Singer Girl on Tuesday, December 30, 2025 - 21:10

I think you may have the tap to make feature on. To disable this feature, go into settings and go to Accessibility and then go to touch and then that will be an option under that that will say too and then he just turned it off. It’s different than the way to feature. That makes the screen activate with just one tap. I think that may be what your problem is. Public help. I hope this helps.

By Singer Girl on Tuesday, December 30, 2025 - 21:12

I think you may have the tap to make feature enabled. To disable this feature, go into settings, accessibility, and then touch. In that category almost knew I knew it. You will see something called tap to wake, and you can toggle this off by a double tapping it. That feature does make the screen wake with just one tap. I hope this helps. I think that may be the issue you’re having.

By Enes Deniz on Tuesday, December 30, 2025 - 21:22

Why are the settings such a mess? You have Raise to Wake Up under Settings>Face ID and Passcode, Tap to Wake Up under Settings>Accessibility>Haptics, and you have a second Face ID and Attention option under Settings>Accessibility. I like how the settings are better categorized on MacOS or on Android. It's so counterintuitive on iOS though.