I don’t want Siri, Google, and Bixby to speak to me. Please make sure that the power button does what it is supposed to.
Each major phone manufacturer is guilty if a serious crime. I will not be silent about it: They stole our power button. Apple, Google, Samsung: guilty, guilty, guilty.
The power button was used to allow you to turn off your phone. But then, these companies made it a shortcut to call their digital assistant. This is wrong and bad, and I politely demand that they return the items they have taken from us.
You see, I understand the logic. As phones got larger, physical buttons such as Apple’s home button had to be removed. Existing buttons were left to take up the role. Apple moved the Siri function to its power button in the iPhone X. To turn your iPhone off, you have to press a number of buttons. Siri will listen to your complaints about the power button not working as it should if you repeatedly press the power button. You’ll have to delete the screenshot later if you don’t hold down that button combination for long enough.
It happens on both Samsung and Google phones. The Pixel 7 Pro’s power button was long-pressed, bringing up the Google Assistant. It also displayed a prompt asking it how to apologize in Spanish. No, Google. You should apologize. The Galaxy S22 phones that I used this year all offered to set up Bixby if I had long-pressed the power button. Both Samsung and Google allow you to change it back into the power menu. Samsung also has the decency of putting a shortcut to side keys on its shutdown screen. But enough is enough. The default setting is to turn off the phone by long-pressing the power key.
What really adds salt is the fact that the button combination that turns off your phone is different on each phone. To turn off your phone’s shutdown options, hold down the power button and volume keys on an iPhone. It’s just a quick press of the power button and volume up keys on a Pixel phone. You can take a screenshot if you make a mistake and press the volume up key. Samsung requires you to press and hold both the volume down key, and the power button.
Every phone has a different button combination for turning off the phone.
Because most people don’t change their phones as often as I do, they only need one of these combinations. That’s what I understand. Most people don’t turn off their phones…ever. That’s fine, too. It’s not unreasonable to expect a power button that does what it was named for. You can call it the “sleep/wake button” or “side key”, but everyone knows what it is really for. We don’t need to agree on that. Let’s at least agree on a set of buttons so I can stop accidentally taking screenshots of my screen.
My suspicion is that my plea was in vain. It’s up to us, as individuals, to stop power-button chaos.
- If you have an iPhone, your luck is nil. You can turn Siri off by going into Settings > Accessibility > Side Button. Select Off under the “Press and Hold to Speak” option.
- Go to Settings > Advanced Features > Side key on a Samsung Galaxy and choose Power off menu from the “Press and Hold” options.
- Go to Settings > System > Gestures on a Pixel phone and press and hold the power button. Turn off “Hold for assistant”
