Where is screen timeout?

If you have ever gone looking for “screen timeout” on an iPhone, you will not have found it — those two words appear nowhere in iOS Settings. We checked how 43 operating systems label the setting that decides how long your screen stays on, and found four different names for one idea.

Four names for one setting

Eight of the 43 systems we catalogue have a setting for how long the display waits before it goes dark. Not one of them agrees on what to call it:

“Screen timeout” is the most common label and also the phrase most people search for — but it is an Android phrase. Carry it to an iPhone and it stops working, because Apple named the same control after what it does to the lock screen rather than what it does to the display.

Where it lives on each system

Every one of the eight is exactly two taps from the first Settings screen. The difficulty was never the depth — it is the vocabulary.

Seven of the eight put it under a group named for the display. Only Mac OS X files it under power — Energy Saver — which is a 2009 answer to a 2009 problem: on a laptop of that era, the screen was the battery.

Why Apple calls it Auto-Lock

The names are not arbitrary. Each one tells you what the vendor thought the setting was for.

Screen timeout describes the mechanism: a timer runs out and the screen turns off. Sleep describes the state the device enters. Display sleep narrows that to the panel, which matters on a desktop where the machine keeps running. Auto-Lock describes the consequence — when the screen goes off, the phone locks, and you will need your passcode or your face to get back in.

Apple’s label is the only one of the four that is about security rather than about the screen. That is a reasonable thing to foreground on a device people leave on tables, and it is also why no amount of searching for “timeout” will surface it.

What to do on a device that is not in the table

Thirty-five of the 43 systems have no such setting. On a television or a games console, the equivalent control is a power-saving option rather than a display one — it decides when the whole device sleeps, not when the picture goes dark, and we have deliberately not counted those as the same thing.

On anything with a screen you hold, the search order that works is: look under Display first, then Battery or Power, and try the words timeout, sleep, auto-lock and lock in turn. You can also search all 43 systems at once, or open your own system in the simulator and click to the screen before you change anything on the real device.