The one iPhone 12 setting you need to enable now

The one iPhone 12 setting you demand to enable now

(Image credit: Tom'southward Guide)

If you've just got an iPhone 12 or iPhone 12 Pro and so y'all'll want to get and cheque COVID-19 exposure notifications are enabled if you lot want to do your best to avoid the deadly virus.

When y'all ready up a new iPhone 12 from an older iPhone fill-in, COVID-xix contact tracing apps might end up having their notification disabled, the BBC reported. While the app itself won't exist disabled, this could mean you might miss an important warning alerting y'all to potential coronavirus exposure.

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As it stands, this problem simply appears to impact the official National Health Service (NHS) contact tracing app used in the U.Thou., which has already been marred past various problems and launch delays. Simply there's potential for information technology to affect other contract tracing apps.

However, we too found that our iPhone 12 review unit had Exposure Notifications turned off in the U.S. Then nosotros turned them on.

How to plough on Exposure Notifications

If you are worried that you might not be getting the correct coronavirus notifications and so you need to go into the native Settings app on iOS and navigate to the "Exposure Notification" sub-menu.

iPhone 12 exposure notifications — (Image credit: Future)

One time at that place it's simply a case of tapping on the Turn on "Exposure Notifications" choice and you should be all set to receive notifications from coronavirus runway and trace apps.

After turning Exposure Notifications on and selecting a state and state, nosotros were told that our region has an exposure notification app. In this case it was for the New Jersey Department of Health. Nosotros downloaded the app and and so enabled permissions for notifications.

The crux of the problem seems to be with iCloud iPhone backups. When you download a backup from iCloud, ordinarily when setting up a new iPhone, information technology doesn't re-enable all the permissions you may accept granted the backed-up apps. As a event, apps similar the contact tracing tools won't take permission to use a Bluetooth-based matching and tracing functionality.

The NHS COVID-19 app Twitter account tweeted a list of devices that the app has been tested with and the iPhone 12 wasn't among them, so such problems aren't necessarily a huge surprise given the iPhone 12 has simply merely launched.

Hi Peter,Sorry to hear you lot are having issues installing the app. A total list of compatible devices can be found on our website: https://t.co/L0MTBwbBxCThanks,SarahOctober 24, 2020

Some users have reported that simply deleting and reinstalling the app will then trigger a notification option to be enabled, though that's hardly an elegant solution to the problem.

Some 18 million people have installed the NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app, so at that place's potential for a large number of people to be afflicted by the problem given the popularity of iPhones. However with the NHS aware of the issue, nosotros are hopeful that information technology will push button out an update to ensure that of import notifications aren't quietly disabled when their users want them switched on.

Roland Moore-Colyer is U.1000. Editor at Tom's Guide with a focus on news, features and stance articles. He ofttimes writes about gaming, phones, laptops and other bits of hardware; he's too got an interest in cars. When not at his desk Roland tin be found wandering around London, often with a await of marvel on his face.