How to Stop iPad from Sleeping and Turning Screen Off

How to Stop iPad from Sleeping and Turning Screen Off

Many iPad users wonder how they can stop their iPad screen from sleeping automatically. If you want to stop the iPad from sleeping and turning the display off on its own, you can easily do so with a settings adjustment. For the unfamiliar; the iPad will put itself to sleep and turn the screen off when its not in use after a short amount of time, this mechanism is the default because it helps to preserve battery life and can improve device security since by sleeping itself it will as well.

Thats all well and good, but some users may find the automatic sleep behavior on iPad to be overly aggressive, and if you use the iPad to read something while participating in another activity, like cooking, reading or referencing something on screen, of if you're using the iPad as a display or kiosk type situation. Its important to differentiate between the automatic screen sleeping behavior, which occurs with inactivity, and the automatic display brightness adjustment, which occurs with changes in ambient lighting.

You can if desired, note that it changed locations within Settings from iOS 11 onward. In modern versions of iOS, you can stop the iPad from sleeping the display with inactivity, or delay how long it takes for iPad to sleep the screen, by doing the following: To completely disable the iPad screen sleep behavior just choose Never, but note that by doing so you will need to lock the iPad display yourself by hitting the lock/power button on the device (or using the virtualized lock button via Accessibility). Just remember there are security and privacy ramifications with the Never option, because if the iPad does not sleep itself and automatically lock, then anyone can freely use the device at any time just by walking up to it in the woken and active state.

It will be entirely up to you or the last person on the iPad to turn off the display and lock it down with the lock button. A decent compromise for many users is the 10 or 15 minutes options, which allow ample time to stare at a screen without interacting with it, before the iPad display turns itself off. The 15 minute option is popular with hobbyists reading manuals and guides, musicians reading notes or tabs, and chefs or any other kitchen enthusiast , and has the advantage of still turning itself off for security and privacy reasons after 15 minutes of inactivity.

By the way, if your iPad is an earlier model running a prior version of iOS the but is located elsewhere, contained within the General settings section rather than the Display settings. And for those who are curious, this setting also exists on iPhone and iPod touch too, though it seems to be used less on the pocketable devices compared to iPad.