As we all know the meaning of the magic tap (double tap with two fingers) depends on context. Its default behaviour (when not in e.g. a call or in an input with a keyboard that has dictation) is to launch music playback. That's exactly what I would like to disable. The reason: sometimes the touch screen unavoidably misinterprets gestures and takes my exploratory single finger touch as a magic tap and thusthe phone begins to play some random music at a quite high volume. It's not so nice and is definitely a nuisance if it happens e.g. on the passcode input screen (it has just happened) or at another very random place that is nothing to do with music playback, e.g. on the custom keyboard of a Hungarian hangman game I like to play. So I'd like to get rid of this behaviour and limit it to the Music app itself.
Has anybody got any ideas whether this can be done and if yes, then how?
By Laszlo, 10 March, 2025
Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Comments
this is working as intended
This is working as intended. The short answer to you r question is no.
What I do
What i do when I have this problem is change the double tap focus to something else. For example, if the last thing I used magic tap for was music and I want to use magic tap for something else, I go to the something else, focus on the button I want to use magic tap on, and double single finger tap on it to activate it. Thereafter, i can use magic gtap to reactivate this other button. Note: it also helps to close the app where you want to stop magic tap focus.
I often use magic tap to start and stop a book I'm reading, but if I switch to news and watch a video, I have to go back to my book's play button and do the single finger double tap to switch the magic tap focus back to my book.
I hope all this makes sense.
good luck!
Bruce
Disabling magic tap
Go to Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, Commands, Touch Gestures. Under Two Fingers, select two finger double tap. Change it to something other than Magic Tap. Voila.
Up until recently, there…
Up until recently, there wasn't - Apple Music always played random stuff, whether it was running or not initially.
There's still no way to completely stop it other than as a previous poster pointed out disabling magic tap, but if you go into the app switcher and close Apple Music, at least on my iPad it won't play until you load it again.
Unfortunately this means you'll have to remember to close Apple Music every time you switch away from it, but it's the only thing I know of that works.
Oh thanks, I found my solution
Thanks for the answers, especially paulmartz! I definitely didn't want to disable magic tap entirely, however paulmartz's answer gave me the idea that lead me to my solution. I reassigned magic tap to the right swype with two fingers gesture which I have never used for anything, and furthermore the touchscreen won't misinterpret simple exploratory touches as this. And I assigned an innocent command ("announce text style" for now) to the double tap with two fingers gesture. This practically solved this problem for me, and what's more the new gesture for the magic tap is much more reliable to execute.
When doing the reassignment I was amazed by the tons of commands VoiceOver offers to be assigned to. Frankly I haven't heard about a lot of them so far.
This is what makes VO stand out
The number of things you can assign is outstanding. This includes on Braille displays. Vo is probably the best screen reader.
Changing playback to something else.
I also found out that changing your playback to a book or another app works. As long as that app is opened, it will work. I do not use Apple Music though, so if it plays something, it is very random and absolutely unrelated to what I listen to. On the other hand, I do use dictation only for English and very rarely, so disabling the gesture would also work. You could also try finding a podcast and playing that, maybe that will override the loud volume of the music app.
Oh and, yes, to the other person who said Voiceover is good, yep, it's awesome. Apple everything is good for productivity, and paired with other good apps, it is way too good to be true. :)