Short answer: how you force restart depends on your model. On iPhone 8 and later, including the 18 series, press Volume Up, press Volume Down, then hold the Side button until the Apple logo appears. iPhone 7 holds Volume Down + Power; iPhone 6s and earlier holds Home + Power. It is not the same as a normal restart, but it does not erase your data, and it is the first thing to try when the screen is frozen, or after an update leaves the phone unusually hot and draining.
Button sequence by model
| Model | What to do |
|---|---|
| iPhone 8 and later (all full-screen models, including the 18 series) | Quickly press Volume Up → quickly press Volume Down → hold the Side button until the Apple logo appears, then release |
| iPhone 7 / 7 Plus | Hold Volume Down + Power together until the Apple logo appears |
| iPhone 6s and earlier | Hold Home + Power together until the Apple logo appears |
Three details people get wrong:
- The volume presses are quick clicks, not holds — holding a volume button opens something else entirely.
- Do not let go before the Apple logo shows. A black screen in between is normal; be patient.
- The whole thing takes about ten to fifteen seconds. No computer and no extra tools are needed.
How it differs from a normal restart
A normal shutdown is polite: iOS asks each app to quit, flushes caches to disk, and only then cuts power. That works beautifully — as long as the system is still responding.
A force restart skips all of it and reinitialises the system, clearing every process state held in memory. That is the whole difference:
- When a background process is wedged and the screen will not respond, the normal shutdown cannot even finish — the slider will not move. Only a force restart helps.
- When the phone is merely slow or warm, both do roughly the same thing: reset the running state.
That is why it is the standard first move after a bad update: an index or migration process that got stuck will not be cleared by a graceful shutdown, but a force restart takes it out.
When to use it
The situations are clear-cut:
- black screen, frozen interface, touch not responding;
- unusual heat or clearly faster drain after an update, well past the normal settling window;
- one app is stuck and will not close (try swiping it away first, then force restart);
- the screen lights up but the shutdown slider will not move.
One honest caveat: a force restart is first aid, not maintenance. There is no reason to do it on a schedule when the phone is fine. It fixes "stuck", not the root cause of "draining" or "hot".
If it is still wrong afterwards
If the problem comes straight back, the cause was not a stuck process. Continue in this order:
- Check battery usage.
Settings → Battery, last 24 hours. The app whose share of drain is out of proportion to its on-screen time is the suspect. - Tighten Background App Refresh.
Settings → General → Background App Refresh, keep messaging and mail, turn off the rest. Notifications still arrive — see What is Background App Refresh?. - Rule out the normal settling period. Heat and drain within 72 hours of an update are background indexing; see How long does iOS indexing take?.
- Check Battery Health.
Settings → Battery → Battery Health & Charging. Below 80%, iOS limits performance earlier and both heat and stutter get worse; see What is Battery Health?. - Last resort. Update to the latest minor version, or back up and reinstall.
When it is a hardware conversation
If a force restart does not help and any of these apply, it is time to think about the battery or hardware:
- frequent repeat freezes after restarting, several times a day;
- the body is hot to the touch (not just warm) with the screen dimming and charging pausing — that is thermal protection stepping in, see Why does an iPhone get hot while charging?;
- Battery Health below 80% together with unexpected shutdowns;
- it will not turn on at all, or does not respond to a charger.
Before you go there, do one force restart — it is free, it erases nothing, and it rules out a large share of problems that look like hardware failure but are not.