Hidden iPhone Features That Make Your Life Easier

Switch apps with a swipe

On iPhone X family models (the iPhone X, XS, XS Max, and XR), you may know that you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen to return home. But you can also swipe your finger left or right across the Home Indicator (that horizontal bar that appears at the bottom of the screen most of the time) to switch between apps. It's a convenient way to quickly move to the last app you're using, and if you keep swiping you'll keep jumping to previous apps.

Bring multitasking controls into view

Swiping up from the Home Indicator takes you home, yes, but if you swipe up more slowly and then let go, you'll enter the iPhone's Multitasking view. This view lets you swipe through previews of all the apps you've used recently. Tap on any of them to bring them to the foreground. If you think an app is misbehaving, swipe up on on that app's preview and you'll force it to quit.

If you want to access this view even faster, try swiping up from the left bottom corner diagonally. Every bit of time saved helps.

Customize Control Center

Control Center is a handy place to quickly access features of your phone without opening an app. To open Control Center on an iPhone X family phone, swipe down from the top right corner of the screen. (A swipe from the rest of the top of the screen brings down Notification Center, but if you do it from the top right, it's Control Center instead.)

Control Center is a great place to quickly play or pause music or podcasts, adjust volume and brightness, disconnect from Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and perform all sorts of other tasks. (Here's a bonus tip: Try to 3D Touch — or Haptic Touch if you're on an iPhone XR — on buttons within Control Center. You'll find that many of them will expand into more full-featured controls. For instance, you can select which level of brightness for the flashlight.)

But there's more to Control Center than you might think — it's customizable. Go to the Settings app, tap on Control Center, and then tap Customize Controls. From here you can add all sorts of buttons, including access to Accessibility shortcuts, screen recording, and apps like Calculator and Alarm.

Invert bright apps

So you're looking at your iPhone at night and the bright all-white interface of an app is just too glaring to use. Consider using an Accessibility feature called Smart Invert Colors in combination with Control Center to combat this problem.

Smart Invert Colors inverts your phone's screen, so white is black and black is white. This is great for webpages that normally feature black text on a white background. What makes this feature Smart is that it's generally intelligent enough to not invert other media items, like photos, for example. The result is a surprisingly readable white-on-black view that's better for certain apps when you're in the dark.

First, open the Settings app, tap General, then Accessibility. Scroll to the bottom and tap on Accessibility Shortcut, and make sure that Smart Invert Colors is checked. This means you can triple-click the side button to bring up a quick menu of Accessibility options, including Smart Invert Colors.

Then go to back to the top level of the Settings app, tap Control Center, then Customize Controls, and add Accessibility Shortcuts to your control center. Now you can also trigger Smart Invert right from the Control Center in a couple of taps.

Get access to the camera or flashlight fast

At the bottom of the lock screen of iPhone X family devices, you'll see two icons: a flashlight on the left and a camera on the right. They're easy to miss, but they're important — they give you quick access to those two features.

But you can't just tap on them: Apple doesn't want to trigger those features with a mistaken touch. So you have to use 3D Touch on them in order to trigger them (which means press hard — on the iPhone XR, just touch and hold). This is the best way to turn on the flashlight, bar none.

View the Today screen

One of the most useful features of iOS is hidden off to the left of Notification Center. It's the Today screen, populated by little items called "widgets" that are generated by apps on your phone. These widgets can be full of useful information or can provide shortcuts to useful features.

To see the widget view, swipe down from the top of the screen to display Notification Center. Then swipe from left to right to reveal the Today view. It's useful! And you can make it more useful by customizing it. Just scroll down to the bottom of the view and tap Edit to choose which widgets you want to display in this view.

Unsubscribe from notifications

One of our favorite features of iOS 12 is the ability to manage your notifications directly from Notification Center. When you're viewing notifications, swipe from right to left on any of them to reveal a sub-menu. From here you can tap View to open the app that sent the notification, Clear All to erase all of that app's notification bubbles, or Manage.

Manage is a great feature. Try it sometime. From the resulting interface, you can quickly turn off all notifications for that app — the equivalent of an unsubscribe link in an email. You can also choose Deliver Quietly, an option that lets those notifications show up in Notification Center, but not interrupt you by popping up a notification bubble while you're doing something else.

Author : idelta