How to restart your iPhone without using the Power or Volume buttons

Rebooting or restarting your iPhone and iPad is one of the most common ways to troubleshoot several problems. If you have damaged the physical power and volume buttons, or due to any other reasons you can’t effectively press them, here are several ways to restart your iPhone without using the Power (lock/side button), Home, or volume buttons.

iPhone reboot screen showing the white Apple logo on black background

Restart your iPhone or iPad without using buttons

Restart simply means turning off the device and turning it back on. Here’s how to do that without hardware buttons.

From iPhone Settings

  1. Open the Settings app and tap General.
  2. Scroll to the bottom and tap Shut Down.
  3. Drag the power off slider to the right to turn off your iPhone.
  4. To turn it back on, plug the iPhone in to charge, and it will automatically switch on the device.
Shut Down iPhone from Settings

Use AssistiveTouch

With AssistiveTouch, you can perform several handy actions, including restarting your iPhone. Here’s how:

  1. Open iPhone or iPad Settings and go to Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch.
  2. Enable AssistiveTouch, and you’ll see a button appear on your screen.
    Note: Before moving to the next step, make sure it says Open Menu next to Single-Tap, Double-Tap, or Long Press. If not, tap Single-Tap, Double-Tap, or Long Press and choose Open Menu. You can also choose Restart.
  3. As per the chosen setting, tap, double-tap, or long-press the AssistiveTouch button and tap Device > More > Restart > Restart.
Restart using AssistiveTouch on iPhone

Drain and recharge the battery

If you have time to waste, you can just let your iPhone’s battery run out. After a while, it will shut down, and then when you plug it into a power source, it will reboot automatically.

Draining the iPhone battery isn’t the quickest way to go about things. But you can discharge your battery faster by going into a low signal area, running a power-hungry app like Pokémon GO in augmented reality mode, or turning the display brightness to maximum.

This method requires patience, but is very effective. It’s kind of a double-whammy, too, because you’ll also have to wait for your device to re-charge after it boots back up.

Low Battery on iPhone

Reset Network Settings

Using pretty much any of the major reset settings will reboot your iPhone or iPad after it finishes resetting. But since you’re going for a reboot here rather than erasing everything, resetting your network settings will have the least-destructive effect on your device as a whole.

This method will erase stored Wi-Fi passwords, and you’ll need to re-pair Bluetooth devices. However, before too long your device will reboot when it’s finished.

Here are the steps to reset network settings to restart your iPhone.

Reset Network Settings iPhone

Rebooting a jailbroken iPhone without using any buttons

If you’re jailbroken, then you have a bit of an edge. Not only can you reboot your device without using any buttons, but you don’t have to waste time with your battery, and you really don’t even have to change any settings on your device, either.

Jailbroken iPhones can take advantage of a popular jailbreak tweak called Activator by Ryan Petrich to set up a reboot action to any Activator gesture they choose.

To do that, follow these steps:

1) Download and install Activator from Cydia’s BigBoss repository if you haven’t already.

2) Launch the Activator app from the Home screen.

3) Tap the Anywhere cell.

Activator Reboot Action

4) Choose an Activator gesture you want to use to reboot your device and tap on it.

Note: We are using the Double Tap Status Bar gesture for this tutorial, but you can choose whichever one suits your taste.

5) In the next view, scroll down until you find the Reboot option. Tap to select it.

Note: Now, the Activator gesture you selected should be assigned the Reboot command.

Activator Double Tap Status Bar Reboot

6) Now, just invoke the Activator gesture you assigned, and your device should reboot automatically.

Note: Since we chose the Double Tap Status Bar gesture, we’ll do just that, and our device will reboot thanks to Activator.

Now, just be patient, and your device will start back up in no time. If you are using a semi-untethered jailbreak, don’t forget to boot semi-untethered!

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