You may have seen this post going around on social media. It states that if you find yourself in an emergency situation, you can push the lock button on your iPhone 5 times and send a message to the closest police station. First, don’t ever accept something like this as fact without checking to see if it is true. Someone might accept a false post as truth and end up believing they’ve sent for help when they have not.
I went straight to the Apple support site to check this one out. It’s partially true. Also, there are different methods of accessing it depending on your phone.
Here’s how to use it on an iPhone 7 or earlier: Rapidly press the side (or top) button five times. The Emergency SOS slider will appear. (In India, you only need to press the button three times, then your iPhone automatically calls emergency services.) Drag the Emergency SOS slider to call emergency services.
On an iPhone 8 or later: Press and hold the side button and one of the volume buttons until the Emergency SOS slider appears. Drag the Emergency SOS slider to call emergency services. If you continue to hold down the side button and volume button, instead of dragging the slider, a countdown begins and an alert sounds. If you hold down the buttons until the countdown ends, your iPhone automatically calls emergency services.
