iOS 12: Page 4

Apple Card, Apple's foray into credit cards, is to be released this summer. There's no exact date set yet for when you can apply for one or when iOS will support it, but it's getting close. Apple just released iOS 12.4 developer and public beta 7, meaning we're almost there since iOS 12.4 is mainly intended to add Apple Card support for iPhone.

We all fall sleep in different ways. Some may require absolute silence, others need white noise, and some enjoy listening to a song or two to help bring on the sleep. If you're in the latter group, like I am, there's a problem. Fall asleep before the music stops, and a loud song may jolt you awake in the middle of the night. With an iPhone, however, that issue can be avoided with a little setup.

When you make an awesome song or beat that you're proud of in GarageBand for iOS, one way to show it off is to turn it into a ringtone or alert tone for your iPhone. That way, anytime you get a phone call or a notification, your musical creation will sound off, and everyone around you will hear it in all its glory. Plus, it's way cheaper to make your tones than to buy them off of iTunes.

Newer smartphones usually come with a decent amount of storage, even at the lowest tier, but that doesn't stop items from filling up all that space. Watching movies offline, shooting 4K videos, and other processes can fill up your phone fast, and so can albums and songs in Apple Music.

A typical hours-long podcast can cover a broad range of topics, and it's not uncommon to stop listening halfway through an episode or to skip through the parts you don't want to hear. Unfortunately, in the Apple Podcasts app, unfinished episodes remain within the app's My Episodes list and will play again automatically once you've finished a previous episode.

A few months ago, iOS 12.1 came out with a handful of useful new features, and iOS 12.2 goes even further. While some of iOS 12.2's new features for iPhone are much welcomed, there are some that we'd be better without.

Ratings and reviews apply everywhere, from a restaurant you want to try to a new camera you're thinking of buying and games you might want to play. Podcasts are no different. Reading reviews of shows can help determine which are worth listening to, and your opinion is valuable to other people too. In Apple Podcasts, there are a few different ways to read, rate, and review shows.

While smartphones are increasing their built-in storage every year, they're also giving you more features that consume all that extra space quickly, like when you shoot 4K videos. So while you may have a load of gigabytes for all your music, it may get eaten up quickly by apps, photos, and videos. Luckily, Apple Music has an auto-delete feature, so you don't have to manage anything manually.

Right now, Apple is testing two versions of iOS. On the one hand, you have iOS 13, buggy but feature-filled. On the other, iOS 12.4. The latter just got an update to the fifth developer and public beta versions, 13 days after the release of iOS 12.4 developer beta 4.

With iOS 13's developer beta in full swing, it can be easy to forget that there's an entirely separate iOS beta cycle still running right now. Yes, iOS 12.4 is still in beta, and unlike iOS 13, it's available to the public for testing.

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?

By default, when you receive a FaceTime video call on your iPhone, the speakerphone kicks in immediately after answering unless you're wearing headphones. It's the exact opposite when it comes to FaceTime audio calls, but it's pretty easy to remedy if you'd rather have the speakerphone kick in instead of the built-in ear speaker.

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.

If you're noticing issues with Portrait Mode on your iPhone 8 Plus, you aren't alone. Apple confirmed the problem by introducing a new software update Monday, June 10, 17 days after the release iOS 12.3.1, and exactly four weeks after iOS 12.3. The update, iOS 12.3.2, is available only for the iPhone 8 Plus and not other iPhone models, so every other device will still be on iOS 12.3.1 for now.

Let's say you wake up in the middle of the night and check your phone to see the time. As soon as you do, you're greeted by a wall of notifications on your lock screen. You just wanted to know how much longer you could sleep, but now your mind's racing after seeing all of the messages you need to deal with. Thankfully, iOS 12's new Bedtime Mode has a solution for this problem.

Apple released iOS 12 on Sept. 17, and most of the announced features have been released for the iPhone's latest available operating system. However, some brand new features can be accessed with Apple's latest beta, iOS 12.4. If you want to try out all its new features before everyone else, you can install the developer or public beta on your iPhone right now.

Apple's aiming to take over the TV world, and it shows in iOS 12.3. Nothing is going on yet with Apple TV+, Apple's video streaming platform with original content, which isn't supposed to come out until the fall. But there are some goodies in the new Apple TV app for iPhone that you should get to know.

With each year that we anxiously await Apple's next big version of iOS, there comes the sad reality that the eldest iPhones will not continue to receive support. That's not the case with iOS 12, however, as the software is compatible with all iPhones currently running iOS 11, going back as far as the iPhone 5S.

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.

News+ is Apple's new digital subscription service for written media that costs $9.99 per month. There is a free trial offered for one month, but you'll start getting charged the monthly fee as soon as your 30 days are up. While it's not very obvious, there is a way to cancel the auto-renewal right before you get charged.

There's always an iPhone in our list of top phones for privacy and security, due in large part to advanced security measures like Face ID, consistent iOS updates, and easy ways to prevent unwanted access and excessive data sharing. However, some of those options actually do the opposite and hinder security. It all depends on how you use your iPhone, but you should at least know everything available.

When your iPhone can't be found, Find My iPhone is a true lifesaver. When you use the feature, you can ping your iPhone and even see its current location on a real-time map. But what happens when your iPhone runs out of battery? Find My iPhone can't locate a dead iPhone, can it? You might be surprised to know it can, to a certain degree.

I'm not a morning person, so getting a "Good Morning" message on my iPhone when I wake up makes me want to toss it across the room. If you feel the same way about this morning greeting, there's an easy way to stop it from showing up on your lock screen. This also applies if your "Good Morning" is actually "Good Afternoon" or "Good Evening," depending on your sleep schedule.

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.

The iOS 12.0 beta earned admiration for its superior performance to last year's controversially buggy iOS 11. That doesn't mean it was free from problems before the stable release went live. During the initial iOS 12.0 beta testing phase, there were plenty of bugs and glitches, many of which affected the apps we use every day. However, none of these issues persist anymore since iOS 12 stable went live.

While iOS 11 was famous for its instability, performance issues weren't the only factor holding it back. The OS overhauled the notification system on iPhone, but not necessarily for the better. iOS 12, however, improves upon these changes, bringing critical features that make viewing and interacting with notifications on your iPhone on par with Android.

Despite what some in the tech-world would like you to believe, iOS isn't totally locked down, free from user customization. Take your home screen, for example. Not only can you change your app icons and move them wherever you'd like, you can actually choose to hide them all. If you have a wallpaper that's just begging to be shown off, this trick is for you.

One interesting feature hiding inside Apple's stock Camera app is a level that helps you take photos of documents and nicely plated food from a top-down perspective. Unfortunately, you'd never know it was there since it's not enabled by default and there is no obvious setting for it.

For most people, the font that Apple uses in iOS is just perfect, but some of you may think it's too big while others with poor vision may have a hard time reading it. Whether you're having a hard time seeing text on your iPhone or just want something different, there are actually three things you can do to adjust how text is viewed.

Ever since iOS 8, you could add widgets on your iPhone using the "Edit" menu on the Today view page, but there's an easier and faster way to get widgets set up for viewing via a right swipe on the lock screen, a swipe right from the first home screen page, and a swipe down from center top everywhere else.

Apple's notification system for iOS was in desperate need of a revision ever since they removed app grouping for new alerts. In iOS 12, they finally brought that back, new and improved, but Apple has also added more useful notifications features, such as Instant Tuning, which helps you quickly manage how notifications come in for each app — if you even want them to.

Among iOS 11's many criticisms, one of the more surprising complaints came from parents worried that Apple wasn't doing enough to monitor and control their children's iPhone usage. Apple seems to have taken these issues to heart, as iOS 12 introduces new and improved parental controls to help encourage healthier mobile habits for kids.

Outside of a few headlining features, Apple focused on polishing things up in iOS 12. Instead of revamping functionality left and right and running the risk of releasing a buggy mess like iOS 11, this year's feature additions are smaller. Case in point, you can now show favicons in Safari — nothing groundbreaking, but a nice touch.

There are a lot of things that make iOS great, but lock screen widgets are not among them. If you want more information on your lock screen other than the date, time, and notifications without having to swipe to a sidebar of widgets, you'd normally look toward Android. However, iOS 12 aims to shake that up a bit with a secret Weather widget for the lock screen — not for the Today view.

Apple's iOS assistant has an undeniably iconic voice — you know Siri when you hear her. As memorable a voice as it may be, you don't need to stick with her default American accent. In iOS 11, you can choose from two other vocal deliveries, and in iOS 12, there are two more accents at your disposal for a total of four more.

If you're reading articles in bed or scrolling through Facebook before trying to fall asleep, you'll spend much less time on your iPhone before drifting off into slumber as long as you're using the right display mode.

While fully closing apps on your iPhone can keep it running at peak efficiency since it frees up memory and stops background refreshing, it's most critical when dealing with unresponsive apps. If you have an issue with a certain app, you can just force-close it instead of rebooting.

Since its humble beginnings on the iPhone 4S, Siri has come a long way. While each iteration of iOS sees new features for the iPhone assistant, iOS 12 offers users some of the best advancements in Siri we've seen in a long time, not the least of which is support for Shortcuts, Apple's replacement to the Workflow app.

One gem that Apple added with iOS 12 is the perfect companion for the dictionary that's already available with the "Look Up" tool. I say gem because it's taken a backseat to all of the other new iOS 12 features, but it shouldn't, because a thesaurus is like the phloem to a dictionary's xylem, making it hard to believe that Apple didn't include this synonym finder from the start.

If you're on iOS 11.4.1 or iOS 12 and go more than an hour without unlocking your iPhone, an "Unlock iPhone to Use Accessories" message will appear whenever you connect your iPhone to a computer or other device that tries to use the Lightning cable's data lines. This is to protect you, but it can be annoying if you have no reason to believe that law enforcement or criminals will have access to your iPhone.