iPhone users left baffled by mysterious ‘blue icon’ appearing at top of screen

Long gone are the days our phones were simple devices with just a handful of buttons.

Now, they have almost limitless potential, so when you see an icon in your status bar you might well have no clue what it actually means.

That's exactly what happened to one Redditor, who posted about an unusual icon on their dad's iPhone.

It appeared at the top-left of the phone's display, next to the clock, and looked like a blue circle with white lines in it.

The post was titled: "What is this blue icon?" and they captioned it: "Came up on my dad’s phone and I have no idea what it is. He has a tendency to just randomly download a ton of apps and never use them so no idea what it could be from. Any help is appreciated, thanks"

Some users couldn't stop themselves from joking around in response, like one who said: "Aliens are listening", while another quipped: "That shows time and space is being stretched. You’re slowing down from light speed."

But the reality was far more prosaic, with the top comment replying: "You have things called voice control turned on?" This correctly sussed out the meaning behind the icon - it's to do with Apple's Voice Control settings.

It's understandable that it's hard to recognize, too. Until recently, the icon for Voice Control was a blue circle with a microphone symbol in it, but Apple updated this for clarity.

This accessibility feature lets users dictate to their iPhone and direct it with their voice - not just to read messages for it to send, but to actually open apps, complete tasks and more.

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It's also very easy to set up - head to Settings, tap on Accessibility in the list of options, then find Voice Control and tap into its sub-menu.

From here you can turn the whole feature on, but also customize it in loads of ways, including setting up commands of your choice if you have certain actions you know you'll want to do all the time.

So, for once, this might be a case of a younger user finding out that their parent is actually using their iPhone with a little more depth than they first assumed.

But one thing we definitely wouldn't recommend? Downloading random apps willy nilly - particularly now that Apple is being forced to let EU residents access alternative app stores.