this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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The article is crap, but it is correct in that you don't need to use airplane mode. I would, however, advise to still use it purely to preserve battery life of your device as otherwise it will very aggressively keep scanning for networks and drain it.
Yep. I do wish there was a toggle for the cellular radio by itself (rather than just mobile data). It's annoying to have to go airplane mode then turn WiFi and BT back on.
On Android you do have that toggle
iOS has it as well.
The cell data button only disables data, but the airplane button disables the cellular radio entirely and doesn’t disable WiFi or Bluetooth. If you want WiFi and BT disabled, you need to tap them separately.
However… the airplane button remembers your last preference. If you tapped airplane and then disabled WiFi and BT, it will disable them next time you turn on airplane mode. If you last used airplane mode with WiFi and/or BT enabled, it will only disable the cell antenna.
That’s what airplane mode is. Try it out in the control center. It doesn't disable my WiFi unless I had WiFi disabled when I last turned airplane mode off. Similar with Bluetooth except turning airplane off turns my Bluetooth on even if I had it off before.
Of course, an OS update or a reboot might reset the value of the previous WiFi state. 🤷♂️
Perhaps this is what they meant:
There’s a separate cellular toggle yes.
On iPhone the airplane toggle is the cellular toggle. It leaves all your other radios active.
It also disables GPS but only because that doesn't work anyway in a fast moving faraday cage without cell tower triangulation.
If you want to disable wifi or bluetooth, those are separate toggles... and by default they just disconnect from your current wifi network and some of your bluetooth devices (your smart watch for example, will stay connected over bluetooth). The buttons are there to use if your wifi or bluetooth aren't working properly, which can always be fixed by just disconnecting rather than disabling the radio entirely.
Airplane mode is one button. Cellular is another button.
Just pull up your control center and you should see.
In iOS, the cell-tower-looking button is for data, it doesn’t disable all of your cellular radios. If you hold down the button in Control Center so it pops up the larger version with descriptions, you’ll see that it says “Cellular Data.”
The Airplane Mode button disables your cellular radios but leaves WiFi and Bluetooth enabled. This is what you want for airplanes. Hence the name “Airplane Mode.”
It’s been a couple years since I had an Android phone (rest in peace, OnePlus 7T Pro 5G, you were too good for this world) but I think to accomplish the same I had to enable airplane mode and then re-enable WiFi and Bluetooth, but I could be mistaken.