Last week I went away for a few days with my wife for our 25th wedding anniversary. I set up my voicemail to out of office. I set up my email to out of office. In Yahoo, it saves whatever the last out of office message was and the last time I had set an out of office on email was in 2018 when her mother passed away.

But in this day and age, I have lots of clients that will text me. So I attempted to set up an auto-reply to text. In settings I went to Focus, then driving and set up an auto reply. Then I just had to toggle manually to driving. Tested it out before we left, worked just fine.

Except that when driving is on, I cannot use my phone. As soon as we got to the rental car and I went to use Waze, my iPhone reminded me that I was "driving" and I could not open the app. So I had to turn driving off to use Waze and therefore my auto-reply went away. I toggled it back and forth at various points during our getaway, but it was rather troublesome.

Is there a different way on an iPhone 12 running the current iOS to set up an auto reply to text?

We are taking a cruise in July to celebrate another milestone and I would very much prefer to have this to go along with my voicemail and email auto reply. And yes, I know the obvious answer is "You are on a cruise, turn the phone off when you board and turn it back on when you get off."

But that is not an option. The kids will be with us and everyone has wi-fi, which means we can text and call each other aboard the ship to meet up for events, meals, etc. And while I want to go somewhat dark and ignore what I can, I cannot go 100% dark. If there is something important, I will take care of it. It's just the everyday stuff, that can easily wait a week, that I would prefer to ignore.

Work Focus will tell them that you have notifications silenced. That usually works but it doesn’t tell them why. Everyone always says to just use the driving notifications but as you say it has its issues.

Here's what I did in regards to Waze. I turned off the driving mode. And in Focus, Do Not Disturb > Settings, there's a tab for apps that you can select that turns on "Do Not Disturb", I selected DriveMode, Google Maps, and Waze. So when I turn on Waze, it puts it on Do Not Disturb. I think I also had to add Waze under "Turn On Autmatically" to activate "Do Not Disturb" when I turn it on. You do that by clicking on Add Schedule or Automation.

There's a tab for Allowed People and I suppose you can add only your family so they can still text you or call you when you have "Do Not Disturb" on.