Suppose you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad with iOS 9 installed. The appearance of this operating system has several strong points, but after a while, the transition animations can make the device feel sluggish. While iOS offers an official option to reduce motion, a recent trick lets you disable them completely, and although the change isn't permanent, it's worth trying.
For years Apple has tried to display a certain "fluidity" and "dynamics" in its devices' interfaces. Unlike Android, which had to struggle with choppy animations and horrible transitions, iOS managed to keep a consistent profile... until now. Many things changed with the arrival of iOS 9, and more than a few users complain about an overall performance drop, especially on older devices that can receive the OS but can't take advantage of all its optimizations. The animations when launching apps are visually interesting, but they reach a point where they seem to "drag" the device down.
The Trick to Disable Animations
The only thing iOS 9 allows is reducing this motion, but transitions never really go away completely. The proposal from the user 'vista980622' on Reddit is a trick that disables animations across the entire interface. The process isn't complicated, although it does require a bit of patience.
- Go to the Accessibility section and activate the Assistive Touch feature.
- Move the Assistive Touch indicator icon to the bottom-right corner of the screen.
- The third step is the most critical: it requires invoking Spotlight (with a swipe down). When the Assistive Touch icon 'jumps' over the keyboard, quickly tap the screen to dismiss Spotlight. If the timing is right, animations will be disabled immediately.
Depending on the device, you may need to try this trick between 3 and 25 times, but it's very well tested. There's no doubt this is a simple bug in iOS 9's interface, which Apple could fix with an update, and since it provides a result many users want, it wouldn't be bad to see it become an official feature. To close, two warnings: The trick conflicts with multitasking gestures (it's recommended to disable them), and the trick lasts until you restart the device.
