iPhone glitch provides huge speed boost by completely turning off animations

The animations came with iOS 7 and are intended to make the phone feel better — but they also take up valuable time

The new Apple iPhone 6S is displayed during an Apple media event in San Francisco, California, September 9, 2015 (REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach)

A secret glitch in the iPhone can be used to make the phone much quicker to navigate.

The trick involves a slightly roundabout way of removing the animations that make it look like apps are flying around the screen as they are opened or closed.

The animations arrived in iOS 7. But many people have taken against them, either because they feel slow, look odd or even bring about feelings of motion sickness.

Apple added a way of getting rid of some of the animations using the “reduce motion” setting that can be found in the accessibility menu. But getting rid of them entirely used to require jailbreaking the phone — a process that was difficult, long and often risky.

Now a new glitch found by a Redditor and pointed out by 9to5mac shows how the animations can be removed entirely.

It is done by heading to the Assistive Touch settings, which can be found by searching at the top of the Settings app. From there, turn on the Assistive Touch switch.

Then head to the Home screen as normal and place the new little button you’ve added to the bottom right of the screen.

Leave it there and get the Spotlight search menu up by swiping down on the home screen. When the new button is just above the keyboard, tap the screen so that the search menu goes away.

The glitch should now be in place, and you might notice an immediate speeding up. If not, keep trying — it might take as many as 20 times for it to start working all of the time.

You can then get rid of the Assistive Touch switch and start navigating around your phone again, without being interrupted by the animations.

The animations will come back again if the phone is rebooted — though you can simply do the trick over again if you do.

The trick appears to work on all devices running iOS, including iPads.