I don’t know what’s going on with my Apple iPhone 5s, but every time I pull it out of my purse it asks “Undo Typing”. What is it, and how do I turn this feature off forever?
You are experiencing one of the more controversial elements of Apple’s iOS interface, the “shake to undo” feature. The intent is that as you’re typing information, a quick shake of the iPhone or iPad will let you erase what you’ve entered without having to select it or otherwise fuss with text selection.
Some people must like it for the feature to have remained in so many versions and updates to the system, but I turned it off so many years ago that I don’t even remember how annoying “shake to undo” can be on your daily use of the gadget.
Regardless, let me show you how to disable this feature!
To start, here’s the iPhone / iOS message you’re probably seeing way more often than you desire:
To fix it, you’ll need to go to Settings on your iPhone (or iPad). Tap on that icon and you’ll have the following set of choices from which to choose:
You wan to choose “General” from this point to get to the, well, general settings.
It looks like this:
For reasons I can’t explain, the Shake to Undo Typing feature is hidden in the “Accessibility” area, along with all the many assistive technologies and tweaks you can make to your iPad or iPhone to meet your needs, as required.
Tap on “Accessibility” to proceed.
You’ll need to swipe down just a bit but look for the section that starts with “3D Touch” (though on earlier phones you might not have that option, so you might look for “Keyboard” instead). The entry you want is ingeniously labeled “Shake to Undo“, and it’ll be turned on, as you can see in the above capture.
Tap on that entry.
So that’s the secret location that lets you enable or disable the “Shake to Undo” feature on your Apple iPhone. Turn it off, see if you miss it. I bet you won’t…