How to turn off animations on iPhone and iPad

Apple employs animation features on iPhone and iPad that some people really like. For instance, opening and closing apps use a zoom type of effect, and wallpaper can shift a bit when moving your device. And sure, these animations are cool for some, but not for others – especially those who are sensitive to motion.

If you would like to do away with these effects, then this tutorial is for you. We’ll show you how to disable animations on iPhone and iPad running any recent version of iOS, including iOS 16.

Holding iPhone that showing the Home Screen with apps and widgets
Image: David Grandmougin | Unsplash

How to disable motion on iPhone or iPad

  1. Open the Settings app and tap Accessibility.
  2. Select Motion.
  3. Turn on Reduce Motion to disable the screen animations.
  4. After switching on Reduce Motion, you will get a new option called Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions. Enabling this reduces the motion for slide-in transitions, like what you get when you tap the <Back or other relevant buttons from the top left of the iPhone screen.
  5. Further, you can also disable Auto-Play Video Previews and Auto-Play Message Effects, which turns off the bubble and screen effects in Messages and lets you tap the arrow for the message if you want to play the effect.
Enable Reduce Motion and Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions on iPhone

Immediately after following the above steps, you’ll notice a difference in the types of effects we described above. You’ll see that before, opening & closing an app used a zoom animation. With Reduce Motion enabled, it uses a simple dissolve or fade effect instead.

Other things you’ll notice are with your wallpaper, which will no longer use that parallax effect. And when using the app switcher, the apps won’t zip across quickly as you swipe. Animations in certain apps will also be affected, depending on the app.

These animations don’t appear to serve any functional purpose, and they’re merely for aesthetics. So, if you prefer to go without them, you can do so quite easily.

Are you going to get rid of the animations on your iPhone or iPad? Or, do you like them?

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