Apple Patches Siri Trick That Enabled Users To Activate Night Shift In Low Power Mode

Apple’s new Night Shift feature has undoubtedly been hailed as one of the triumphs of iOS 9.3. The new mode, which allows the color temperature of the display to be altered based on the time of day, has instantly been adopted by users across the globe looking to reduce the amount of blue light that they absorb on a daily basis. The feature may offer tangible benefits to users, but it seems that it also offered up a relatively minor bug that allowed Siri to bypass the iOS Low Power Mode by enabling Night Shift. Apple appears to have now resolved that particular issue as part of a slew of server-side fixes.

So, the problem went a little something like this; iOS has a built-in Low Power Mode that detects when the battery reaches a certain level and prompts the user to enter the device into a mode that will turn off all non-critical networking features to reserve battery life. Night Shift is definitely classed as one of those non-critical drains on power.

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However, even when users had explicitly opted to enter into the Low Power Mode, Night Shift could still be turned on through the use of Apple’s voice-activated digital assistant, Siri. Having that ability essentially negated the benefit that Low Power Mode provides.

It’s now been discovered that the issue no longer exists, and has most likely been fixed by Apple server-side along with a slew of other updates and fixes that have managed to resolve a number of problematic issues that users have been facing relating to Siri. Now, whenever a user tries to activate Night Shift via Siri when the device is in Low Power Mode, the digital assistant replies with the following response: “In order to turn on Night Shift, I’ll have to turn off Low Power Mode. Shall I continue?” 

This is in stark contrast to Siri’s previous behavior which simply obeyed the user’s command and activated the Night Shift mode regardless of the battery state and whether or not the device was currently running in Low Power Mode.

It’s likely that Apple took the opportunity to fix this slight issue at the same time as implementing a server-side fix for the more serious problem that allowed contacts and photos to be accessed via a Siri search.

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