iOS 12
How To: Completely Turn Off Siri on Your iPhone
Not everyone digs Siri. Some of you probably can't live without the personal assistant on your iPhone, and some of you probably never even use it — and likely never will. If you fall into the latter category of iPhone users, you can simply disable the feature altogether, which will prevent accidentally triggering her or him anymore and will keep your iPhone nice and secure overall.
How To: Unlock Virtual Reality 'Flyover' Cities in Apple Maps to Navigate & Tour Places in 3D on iPhone
A little-known feature in Apple Maps for your iPhone lets you tour big cities like you're Godzilla, and it's actually quite easy to access — if you know the secret.
How To: Enable One-Handed Typing on Your iPhone's Stock Keyboard
Apple introduced third-party keyboards back in iOS 8, and swipe-input options like Gboard, SwiftKey, and Swype made typing on an iPhone one-handed much easier. Even better, apps like Word Flow moved the keyboard to the side of the iPhone, so there was less thumb-stretching. Well, ever since iOS 11, Apple has had its own option for better one-handed typing in the stock keyboard.
How To: View Indoor Maps for Malls & Airports in Apple Maps
Apple has some great features aimed at making the lives of globetrotters and mall aficionados significantly easier, such as having detailed floor plans for airports and shopping centers in its native Maps app. With this feature available in Apple Maps, you no longer need to rely on publicly posted maps and directions that are often hard to understand.
How To: Take Live Photos of FaceTime Video Calls (& Protect Yourself from Getting Recorded)
When you're taking a video in the Camera app on your iPhone, there's a little white shutter button in the corner that lets you take a still image while you're filming. Apple brought that same concept over to the FaceTime app in iOS 11, iOS 12, and higher, so you can take Live Photos of your friends during video chats.
How To: Type to Siri on Your iPhone When You Don't Want to Talk
Back in May 2017, Apple filed a patent application for a way to communicate with Siri by writing her questions and responses using iMessage. While that didn't make it into iOS, thankfully, something even better did — a way to ask Siri things with the keyboard directly in the Siri interface. This works in iOS 11 and later.
How To: Offload Unused Apps to Free Up Storage Space on Your iPhone
When Apple revamped the storage management system in iOS 11, it built in a feature that lets you free up space on your iPhone in a more efficient manner. The option allows you to remove an app while preserving its data and documents should you choose to reinstall it later — and it can even do so automatically for unused apps when you're running out of space.
How To: Record Your iPhone's Screen with Audio — No Jailbreak or Computer Needed
The only official way to record your iPhone's screen before iOS 11 was to hook it up to a Mac and use QuickTime Player to do the recording for you. If you wanted to record your iPhone's screen without an external device, there were unofficial apps you could use, like AirShou, but they required complicated installations. Now, in iOS 11, iOS 12, and iOS 13, Apple has an official, native screen recording tool.
How To: Take or Disable Live Photos During a FaceTime Video Call
Nothing has stopped you from taking a screenshot of a funny moment in a FaceTime video call before, and nothing probably will. But screenshots are old news. Apple has made it even easier to take capture FaceTime moments on your iPhone, and the results are more lively.
How To: Save Cellular Data by Using Wi-Fi Only for FaceTime Audio & Video Calls
This may not matter to you if you only FaceTime from your iPhone occasionally, but if you're FaceTiming every day on a limited data plan from your cellular provider, you're going to want to conserve as much data as possible by making sure that you're connected to Wi-Fi only — especially if they are video calls.
How To: Change Your FaceTime Caller ID to an Email Address or Phone Number
Whenever you make FaceTime audio or video calls from your iPhone, Apple automatically uses your phone number or Apple ID email address as the caller identification. So when someone that you're calling sees the incoming call, they'll see it's from your phone number or email address. But what if you'd rather it be a different identifier?
How To: Turn Off Voice Feedback for Siri (Aka Mute Siri)
Siri can definitely be helpful when you need it, but you may not want the entire world hearing Siri's responses in certain situations. If you're in a library, meeting, class, or another scenario where your iPhone's voice assistant would do more harm than good, there's a way to keep Siri silent ... but it's tricky.
How To: Use 'Hey Siri' Hands-Free on Your iPhone
The primary method of activating Siri is done by pressing and holding either the Home or Side button, depending on the iPhone model, but there's a much better way to ask a question to Siri or command it to do something — and you don't need to touch your iPhone at all to do it.
How To: Move Multiple Home Screen Apps at Once
If you've ever tried to make massive changes to your home screen, you know how tedious it can be. Dragging apps one-by-one, in-and-out of folders, all over your iPhone can drive anyone up the wall. It doesn't have to be like this anymore — iOS has a simple way to move as many home screen apps as you need to all at once, saving you both your time and your patience.
How To: Take Long Exposure Photos on Your iPhone
While Live Photos has been a fun addition to iOS ever since the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, there hasn't been much practical use for Apple's moving images so far. That was, until iOS 11 added advanced features such as long exposure effects that make a DSLR less and less impressive these days.
How To: Use & Customize Control Center on Your iPhone
One of the most exciting features in iOS 11 was the fully revamped Control Center, which improved the overall interface visually, made it one page only, and finally made it possible to customize what controls actually appear within it. Customizable controls was previously only available to jailbreakers, but now it's available to anyone running iOS 11 or iOS 12.
How To: Unlock Apple's 'Dark Mode' in iOS 11, 12 & 13 for iPhone
Apple gave us the ability to invert colors on the screen a very long time ago. Then they gave us grayscale mode in iOS 8, Night Shift in iOS 9, and the red screen filter in iOS 10. While the long-awaited "Dark Mode" finally appeared in iOS 13, iOS 11 and iOS 12 both have a decent placeholder for it you can use on your iPhone.
How To: Turn GIFs into Live Photos on Your iPhone
If you've ever wanted to turn your favorite GIF into a live wallpaper for your iPhone or even just make it a 3D Touch-friendly Live Photo that you can share, there's a super simple way to do so.
Safari 101: How to Find Specific Words or Phrases in Webpages on Your iPhone
Apple's default browser for iOS, Safari, has a ton of useful features, and there's so many that it's impossible to know everything you can do to browse the web more efficiently. One you may not know about brings the Command + F keyboard shortcut right to your mobile browser so you can search for words or phrases directly on any webpage you're viewing.
How To: Activate Your iPhone's Hidden Magnifying Glass for Extreme Zooming
When you want to see something far away with a little more clarity or you're having a hard time reading small letters right in front of you, you can point your iPhone's camera at the subject and "pinch" to zoom for a better look. But there's actually something built into iOS for the exact purpose of magnifying objects, and it goes above and beyond the normal camera features.