What is the difference between force reboot and shutdown and…

The cliché that once an iPhone doesn’t work properly one of the first recourses is to restart it. This also applies to other computer devices, with an added detail, we have 2 ways to do it, one is the conventional shutdown and the other is the forced restart.

Shutdown or force restart on iPhone. Which is better and how to use it?

There are several ways to turn off an iPhone. The first of them, the most used, is to press one of the volume buttons and the side button until “Slide to turn off” appears. The second, a little more convoluted and less well known, is to go Settings >> General >> To turn off. The third requires a mixture of the volume buttons and the side button, and manages to force a restart.

In the first two cases, we hold down the side button to turn it on again. Going into more technical details, there are two types of shutdown: the reset, the common; and the hard reset or forced restartwhich we will only use once the iPhone is not responding properly.

In a common shutdown, what we do, either in the first or second way, is to communicate to the system that we are going to turn it off. This causes a cleanup of caches, temporary resources, and stops file system operations, shuts down the operating system gracefully, and cuts power. Then, when turned on, it starts up in the usual order and is operational again.

In a hard reset, the hard or forced restart, the order of the steps is totally different, this it is done on iPhones with Face ID, by pressing and releasing the volume up button, then pressing and releasing the volume down button and then holding the side button until we see the Apple apple. Here the process is more radical, the power is cut off and the processes start normally.

A forced restart should be the last resort

A forced restart interrupts this fast execution, without notice to the system. Although this hard reset is the definitive resource that should be used once the iPhone does not respond to anything else, it must be reserved exclusively for those situations in which we have no other option. This process, although very remote, can create system failures, since if the disk is being written at the time, it can create a write error, which can cause file system corruption.

It is true that with the APFS file system used in Apple devices, this is drastically reduced, making an error of this type almost impossible. Now it’s up to you to decide between forcing a restart or turning an iPhone off and on.