by lucb1e | 2025-10-03 13:02:35+00:00
I just tried going through the setup on a friend's work phone to try it out because it looked useful for my grandpa (he currently has a dumbphone due to eyesight issues, can't really use a touchscreen, but maybe this mode might work with big enough buttons and TTS)

Issues:

1. It says "no results" if you look for "assi" in the settings. I wondered if this phone model doesn't support it, but ended up finding it manually near the bottom of the accessibility settings

2. The setup process is confusing, asking questions we don't know. E.g. need to confirm we know the "passcode" without saying what that is or having a field to try it out on. Does it mean lockscreen PIN? Then sure. We just pressed continue and hoped for the best. It also asks whether apps, that have been on the phone since forever, suddenly need a bunch of permissions. Will this mess with the friend's old settings outside of this special mode? We have no idea what was set and what to pick, e.g. does WhatsApp need contact access to work? Speech recognition? One of them even says "this is unexpected, please report this" How? Where? To what end?

3. Eventually got to the last screen and pressed the button for "Ok, we're ready now, enable!" and it pops up an error message: can't enable with the SIM PIN active, disable this in "settings" (ok which settings, where? Why not link it?)

4. Thankfully, this time we can find that in settings' search and... it's already disabled. I go back to assistive access and the error persists

I literally can't get this set up...

Edit: wanted to show the friend whose work phone this is the silliness of an error that says X and another screen saying the opposite. Now the SIM PIN shows up as enabled! So I pressed disable, they entered the PIN, and it gave another error message. But upon closing the screen, it showed as disabled again. Hoping it was real this time, went back to assistive access and now it could be enabled!

Turns out... assistive access only works for the standard apps: Phone/dialer, SMS, camera, gallery, magnifier

You can enable e.g. Google Maps but it has no idea that you're in assistive mode and shows you the normal UI. It also tells you to go and enable location access in settings, which you can't do in this mode. (I had enabled precise location during the setup of assistive access, but apparently it's broken.)

This does have TTS for the SMS messages, that's nice, but he'd not be able to answer them and have a conversation anyway

The magnifier is too jittery to be useful (his dumbphone has the same feature and issue)

Going back out of assistive access mode, it seems the new app permission levels persisted outside this mode and some things are messed up now (whatsapp complaining it is missing access, for example)

TL;DR same functionality as the 60€ dumbphone / flip phone my grandpa has, except (pro) you also get SMS TTS, (con) it's all non-tactile buttons, and (con) you can't flip the phone open to unlock the screen or accept a call. Especially that last one turned out to be really easy for the two grandparents that can't use a smartphone (one with visual, one with mental impairments). I'd recommend saving 500€ and going for the more accessible option instead