Automatic reply on Do Not Disturb
With Do Not Disturb While Driving, Apple ensures that you can sit in the car undisturbed. This prevents you from receiving all kinds of messages and phone calls while driving. You can even set it up so that people get an automatic reply. That’s not only useful when you’re in the car; you can also use it during a difficult or busy period in your life, such as during exams.
- Set up
- Choose contacts
- Select message
- Switch
Step 1: Set up Do Not Disturb While Driving
To use this feature, you must first enable the Do Not Disturb While Driving (Driving Focus) feature. This works as follows:
- Go to Settings > Focus.
- Check if you have already added the Driving focus. If you see Configure here, tap it and follow the steps. If only Driving, then the Focus is already set.
Step 2: Choose your contacts
At the item Automatic reply on you can set who should receive the message. Choose from None, Recent, Favorites or All contacts. We recommend the option All contacts.
Step 3: Set custom message
Of course you don’t want people to be notified that you are driving (“huh, you don’t have a driver’s license, do you?”). Instead, you can adjust the text at Auto reply.
Step 4: Enable the feature
All you have to do now is activate the function:
- Open the Control Panel.
- Tap Focus, followed by the car icon.
You can also use this when you’re at the movies or at other times when people want to reach you. Whether you need this depends on whether people expect an answer right away. You can also choose to look at your iMessages once a day and sit down to reply to all messages. If you use your iMessage as a tool to get a quick answer from someone, it can be useful to warn that you are not on top of things right now.
The disadvantage of this solution is that you can only reply automatically with iMessage and not with other messaging services such as WhatsApp. Also, it can only be done through the Driving focus and not through the regular Do Not Disturb.
We have a separate tip on using Do Not Disturb in iMessage.
Read more about Do Not Disturb in the tips below:
- All about Do Not Disturb: more peace of mind on your iPhone, iPad and Mac
- Enable Do Not Disturb While Driving
- Using Do Not Disturb on iPhone: Here’s How It Works
- This is how you use Do Not Disturb on the Mac (also super fast)
