You Can Block Certain IPhone Contacts From Seeing Your Focus Status
The Apple Focus feature , introduced in iOS 15 , helps make your iPhone less distracting. Customizable Do Not Disturb profiles provide a way to block notifications when you can’t reply to them: iOS even tells your contacts that you’ve turned off notifications so they don’t bother you. However, these statuses give people the ability to notify you anyway, which takes away your ability to filter interrupts. Although it’s not entirely obvious, you can disable these statuses for certain contacts while still enjoying the benefits of Focus.
Apple pretends you need everyone to see your Focus status
If you dive into the Settings app and look into the Focus section, you won’t find any options to block focus statuses for certain contacts. Every focus you have has a “Share Focus Status” toggle under Focus Status, however this option is all or nothing: if you turn it off, none of your contacts will see your statuses for that focus, which pretty illogical. . However, if you leave this setting enabled, everyone who sends you a message while you are in Focus will see the status.
At first glance, this makes you think that you have to choose between one scenario or another: allow all your contacts to see your statuses and, by default, allow all your contacts to harass you with the “notify anyway” option. or don’t let any of your contacts see these statuses, letting them wonder why you don’t reply to their messages for hours on end.
How to Disable Focus Statuses for Specific iPhone Contacts
The trick here is to know exactly who you want to block from seeing your Focus statuses. When you decide you don’t want to share these statuses with a particular contact, open the conversation with them, then tap on their name. From here, turn off the toggle next to “Share focus status” and that contact will no longer see your focus status in your chat.
The advantage here is that their messages to you still respect the rules of your Focus: if you have it, so your contacts don’t receive notifications, you won’t receive notifications from that contact. And, since they can’t see your status, they also don’t have the ability to notify you anyway: this ensures you don’t receive unwanted texts during Focus sessions. If you ever want to start sharing your Focus statuses with this contact, repeat the process and turn “Share Focus Statuses” back on.
It would be nice if Apple allowed us to customize these statuses a bit more in the future. Right now, it’s a simple message, no matter what focus you’re in: if you’ve turned off notifications (and your name is Jake), your contacts will see “Jake turned off notifications.” I wish Apple would bring Slack-like statuses to iMessage: you could be more specific about what you’re up to, so they know why you can’t reply. Or you can change the message depending on the contact: you may share your exact plans with certain people, but with others you keep things in common.
For now, we’ll have to make do with this current system. At the very least, we can change the setting for each contact: it took me too long to realize that this is not the all-or-nothing option that the Settings app makes it.
[ MUO ]