Revealed: The 7 ways your iPhone can expose you as a cheater – as an unfaithful husband who arranged meetings with prostitutes via iMessages is caught out by his wife

Unfaithful partners beware – your iPhone might be the thing to expose your infidelity. 

As one unfaithful husband is caught by his wife who found years of ‘deleted’ texts with prostitutes synced to the family Mac, cheaters should think twice about their tech. 

You might think that erasing your search history or deleting a few texts is enough to keep your secrets safe.  

But from hidden apps to secret troves of deleted texts, your iPhone may hold far more incriminating evidence than you ever thought. 

So, if you’re suspicious of your partner, or if you are that suspicious partner, here are the seven ways your iPhone might expose you as a cheater. 

1. iCloud syncing 

What many people forget about the data on their iPhone, is that it doesn’t just stay on their phone. 

Thanks to Apple’s iCloud, everything from photos, iMessages, emails to calendars and contacts is backed up and synced across all your devices. 

For most responsible users, this is a really helpful service which helps them work across multiple devices and prevents important photos being lost.

But, for cheaters who would prefer to keep all their data hidden away, iCloud can be a real pitfall. 

Recently, one cheating husband was busted when his wife discovered that his messages to prostitutes had been backed up to the family computer.

Although the husband took care to delete the messages from his phone, everything was still backed up on the cloud and shared to every device he had logged onto.

The husband is now suing Apple for £5 million, claiming that the companies lack of clarity over deleted messages led to his divorce.

However, it isn’t just texts that are stored after they have been deleted as any incriminating pictures may still be stored on the cloud.

Just like messages, images stored on your phone will be synched to all your devices or stored on the cloud well after you think they are gone.  

Earlier this year, an unexplained iOS glitch caused many of these long-deleted images to reappear on users’ phones – no doubt causing some serious panic for the cheaters out there.  

2. Location services

Your iPhone isn’t just keeping a record of what you say, it’s also keeping track of where you go.

It does this so that apps like Apple Maps as well as geo-tagging features in social media like Instagram are able to identify your location. 

But, if you are sneaking off to see someone you shouldn’t be, the last thing you want is for your phone to know where you are. 

It is important to stress that you should never install any kind of tracking or spyware app on your partner’s phone, nor should you track their location with Apple AirTags.

Doing so without their consent could be considered illegal, besides being highly unethical.

That being said, the iPhone itself does already contain a few features that let you spot if your partner is going anywhere suspicious.

First is the Find Devices feature which lets anyone logged into an iCloud account see the location their iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or even AirPods.

Those on a family sharing account can also use this to find their where their devices have been taken.

If you’re not able to use Find My iPhone you can also see a few recent locations by navigating to the Significant Locations settings.

Go to Settings, tap Privacy & Security and go to location services.

From there, scroll down to find the System Services option, open this and select Significant Locations to reveal their location history. 

3. Secret apps 

Cheating partners might have dating or messaging apps on their iPhone that they don’t want their other half to see.

There are number of different ways that they might go about trying to hide these but none are that subtle.

In the upcoming iOS 18 update, iPhone users will be able to lock or hide apps on their phone so they can only be accessed using Face ID.

However, it appears that these hidden apps will be stored in a locked folder labelled ‘Hidden’ making it pretty obvious that they have something to hide.

Cheaters might also delete the app from their iPhone when they are not using it, although this still leaves a trace.

Thanks to the iCloud keeping your data backed up, the App Store keeps a record of apps that have been downloaded and deleted in the past.

Simply open the App Store, head to the Account page using the button in the top right corner and select ‘Apps’.

This will bring you to a page showing all the apps that have data stored. 

You can select ‘Not on this iPhone’ to see which ones have been deleted. 

It is also on this page that you can hide your app history by long-pressing the App’s icon and choosing ‘Hide’. 

4. Screen time and battery drain  

Another way your iPhone might blow your cover is through the Screen Time and Battery Drain menus. 

Although the screen time setting is usually used by those trying to cut down their phone use, it can also be a handy way of seeing where someone is spending their time.

To find it, open Settings and select the purple sand timer icon labelled Screen Time.

From there, head to ‘See All App & Website Activity’ to get a detailed breakdown of what the phone has been used for.

Some cheaters might use cleverly disguised apps which hide messaging services behind innocent appearances. 

One app, called ‘Calculator Pro+’, appears just like a calculator until the user enters a secret code to reveal a hidden SMS service. 

But if you are spending several hours a day on an app claiming to be a calculator, that might be somewhat suspicious.

Even if you are using web versions of the app, it won’t help hide your activity since the Screen Time settings also record how much time you spend on websites. 

Alternatively, open Settings and scroll down to the option marked ‘Battery’,

This will show battery use by app as well as time spent which will easily reveal any suspicious hidden or disguised apps that might be on the device. 

5. Autofill 

If you’ve ever tried to Google ‘porcupines’ on a friend’s computer then you might have a good idea of why autofill can be incriminating.

Even if someone deletes their browser history, Google and other search engines are often holding onto data used to prompt searches and autofill web pages. 

Clearing these is a bit more difficult as it requires emptying the cache from your browser.

Many users simply forget about this but it can also be a pain since it will remove any stored details from other totally innocent websites. 

Typing a selection of letters into someone’s browser may reveal if they have been commonly searching for certain phrases or visiting any dating sites regularly.

On iPhone, you can also swipe down twice from the left to bring up the search menu which will reveal any recent web searches.  

6. ‘Deleted’ items  

If it wasn’t already clear, pretty much anything you ‘delete’ on an iPhone isn’t gone for very long. 

Most worryingly, it’s actually very easy to recover deleted messages on an iPhone up to 40 days after they have been deleted. 

Simply open the Messages app, tap ‘Edit’ in the top left corner and select ‘Show Recently Deleted’.

This will show you any recently deleted messages and give you the option to recover them. 

You can even find deleted browser history in Safari with just a few clicks, making it even harder to hide anything on an iPhone.

To do this, go to the Settings app and select Safari, before scrolling right to the bottom to find the ‘Advanced’ tab where you will find an option labelled ‘Website Data’. 

Selecting this tab will bring up all of the websites that the user has recently visited, even when the browser history has been deleted.

You can either scroll through the list of websites recorded or use the search function to look for specific sites. 

7. Emojis

Although it might not seem like the most incriminating piece of evidence, emojis might just be the thing to give you away. 

On iPhone, opening up the keyboard emoji tab will bring up the list of frequently used emojis.

Beyond the obviously suggestive emojis that might be indicative of some flirty texting, this might also give away that your partner is speaking to other people. 

If you text with your partner a lot and there are emojis in the list they don’t typically send to you that could suggest they have an other conversations on the side.

Certainly not conclusive proof, but this is just one more subtle way your iPhone might expose any cheaters.