Is there extraterrestrial life out there? Is there an afterlife? Why do you only sometimes get the "Accept" and "Decline" buttons when someone calls you on your iPhone? These are the questions that plague our existence.
Unfortunately, we don't have answers for those first two questions yet, but thank goodness for the Internet, because we now know why that little slider only occasionally shows up when someone gives you a ring on your iPhone.
Business Insider recently cleared up the mystery for us in a short explainer. Writer Maya Kosoff did a few experiments to get to the bottom of the case. She looked at if it made a difference whether the caller was an iPhone user or non-iPhone user or was in your contacts or not. No matter what variable she changed, the "Slide to Answer" button always popped up when someone called her. Not helping.
IS IT JUST ME CAUSE I CANT FIGURE OUT WHY I CAN CHOOSE TO DECLINE SOMETIMES AND SOMETIMES I CANT. pic.twitter.com/SqwN6xgaHW
— FREDDY (@FreddyAmazin) February 27, 2015
But as it turns out, none of that matters. It all hinges on whether or not your phone is unlocked. If your phone is locked, you only get the slider option to answer a call. There's no option to decline the call. However, if your phone is unlocked, you will be met with that green "Accept" button or that red "Decline" button when someone calls you.
Though this difference seems kind of weird and unnecessary, it actually makes a lot of sense. When you have your phone in your pocket or in your bag, you wouldn't want to accidentally hit "Accept" or "Decline" because the phone gets jostled. It takes more effort to slide to unlock your phone, which is why that function exists.
But if you really want to see those "Accept" and "Decline" buttons when you get a call on your locked phone, you can apparently get the Cou jailbreak tweak to make that happen. Now all of your life's problems are really solved.
Be sure to follow T-Lounge on Twitter and visit our Facebook page
