Apple earlier on Monday released iOS 26.1 beta 2 and more for developers, and it quietly brings back a nostalgic feature in the form of “Slide to Stop.”
The new option appears on the lock screen for alarms and timers, letting users slide to stop instead of tapping a button. The change comes after many users complained about accidentally hitting “Snooze” when picking up their phones in the morning. Sliding makes it much harder to miss or silence an alarm by mistake.
The gesture feels familiar because it’s a nod to the original “Slide to Unlock” feature that first appeared on the 2007 iPhone. Apple later removed that feature in 2016 with iOS 10, replacing it with “Press Home to Unlock” to support Touch ID (nine years after it debuted on the OG iPhone). Some of you were still in diapers back then.
Check out the retro gesture in action below:
Now, nearly two decades later, the classic slide motion is back—but this time, it’s to make sure you actually wake up. It seems this might be Apple’s way to tease the 20th anniversary iPhone next year, which hopefully will include a “Slide to Unlock” option.
Bas Ording, a former Apple UI-designer, helped create “Slide to Unlock”. In the e-book ‘Unsung Apple Hero’ about his career at Apple, here’s how it was created and why:
For Slide to Unlock, the team knew it needed to utilize a big, long swipe. The gesture also needed to be horizontal rather than vertical, because otherwise it would be too easy to accidentally unlock the screen as it was pulled out of a pocket.
The mechanism included a button that slid across and the text “Slide to Unlock” appeared in the slider bar. But to make it crystal clear it was a slider, the team wanted to add some kind of animation that incited the user to slide the button across the screen.
Arrows were one possibility, but they would have junked up the box, which was already full with text. Ording thought of shining a spotlight on the text, which then moved along the slider box as though someone was shining a flashlight across it.
He was delighted with the effect — it was simple, elegant and fun.
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What's the nostalgia all about? Don't we still slide to answer calls?
Hahahaha, it makes so much sense as to why iOS 26 was poorly received by so many the days following release, but not the day OF release. People got woken up by their alarm the day after updating, tapped their screens incorrectly without properly looking at the screen, their alarm was stopped and they in turn were late for work, which in turn lead to many angry bosses at their employees. LOL.