iOS 14

If you're tired of the default yellow link colors in your Notes app, which I find hard to look at in light mode, there's a way to change them to another color on your iPhone, iPad, and/or Mac running iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and/or macOS Sonoma 14 and earlier.

Not all websites need a dedicated mobile app, which is why so many don't. Web apps are now designed to scale to different screen sizes, so mobile sites in your web browser are easy to navigate and utilize. Still, there's just something about an app on your iPhone's Home Screen that makes it feel more like an app from the App Store.

Seventeen years ago, Apple released iPhone, the first mainstream consumer phone with a touchscreen as its main typing input method. Apple has been perfecting its onscreen keyboard for almost two decades, and it's built with some fantastic features that make typing faster and easier. But it's easy to overlook some of these features, so here are some tips and tricks you need to be using if you aren't already.

There is no iPad version of Apple's Calculator app (at least, not yet), so you won't find it on your Home Screen, in your App Library, or as a shortcut in the Control Center. But that doesn't mean your iPad doesn't have an official calculator.

The Calculator app is probably one of Apple's most-used iPhone apps, yet I always meet people who don't know all the little tricks there are to using it more efficiently. You may know most of them, but there's a chance you don't or at least forget about some of them.

Let's say you're using your iPhone's Calculator app, and you're knee-deep into a complicated calculation with many steps. You type in a large number, for example, "123,466,789," but mess up. You meant to type "5" midway through but accidentally typed "6" instead. The only thing to do now is start over, no matter how far along you are, right? Wrong.

Your iPhone has hidden apps that work behind the scenes to filter SMS messages, trust computers, deal with payments, test ads, and perform other actions. You won't find any of them in your App Library, but there are tricks you can employ to unlock and use some of these secret apps.

Whenever your iPhone's ringer is on, you'll hear Apple's iconic "Connect Power" chime every time you connect it to a wired or wireless power source, which lets you know that charging has started. There's no way to disable the sound without turning on Silent mode, but there is a way to make Siri automatically say whatever you want after a successful connection.

Despite its name, the Frequently Used section on your iPhone's emoji keyboard features both frequently and recently used emoji, and it may contain emoji you've never even touched. If you want to remove all of those recommendations, there's an easy way to reset what you in Frequently Used to the defaults.

Apple offers many ways to customize the Home Screen on your iPhone, from adding widgets and scheduling rotating wallpapers to hiding apps and entire pages. But some of the best ways to customize your Home Screen are options Apple won't even tell you about, either because they haven't become official features yet or because Apple is OK with the workarounds.

Since Shazam became available on iPhone, it's been easier than ever to identify a song playing somewhere in the background. You could hear something you like while watching a movie or sitting in a coffee shop, and all you have to do is open the Shazam app and have it listen for you. But what about music playing on your iPhone via Instagram, TikTok, and other social media apps?

Almost 190 secret characters are hiding behind your iPhone's default keyboard, and I'm not talking about what you see after tapping the "123" or "#+=" keys. These special composite characters can include accents, dots, and other diacritics, and you'll even see some strange typographical characters like the section sign, inverted marks, and per mille symbol. Here's how you find them.

What started as an accessibility setting for hearing aids turned out to be a super helpful tool for anyone with a good set of Bluetooth headphones. The problem is that most iPhone and iPad users still don't know about it. If you're one of them, you need to see what this underrated gem in iOS and iPadOS can offer you.

Apple likes hiding things in its software, including secret apps, hidden iMessage effects, status bar customization, nameless icons, and red screen mode, but some of its best Easter eggs are right in front of you on the Home Screen.

Speech-to-text technology can be seen on your iPhone in various places, from the Dictation tool to Apple's new behind-the-scenes, auto-created transcripts for podcast episodes. Your iPhone also has some pretty impressive text-to-speech capabilities. With them, your iPhone can read webpages, documents, or whatever text is on the screen out loud to you — only some of these tools aren't easy to find.

Whether it's everybody or just a specific contact you can't hear during audio and video calls when wearing headphones, your iPhone has hidden, little-known tools to help you catch every word they say in the conversation. Even if you can normally hear everyone during calls, customizing these headphone preferences can make conversations crystal clear.

Your iPhone has a powerful feature that can keep your secrets hidden from other people, and you'll never have to worry about sharing or showing someone something embarrassing or incriminating ever again.

There's a world of hidden features on your iPhone just waiting to be explored, and one of them is hiding in plain sight right in front of you. You likely see it multiple times a day after performing a routine action without ever thinking twice about what else it can do, and you're not the only one.

If you want to try out one of Apple's beta programs on your iPhone — whether that's by becoming a developer, joining the public beta, or using an IPSW of an available beta update — there's always a possibility that you'll want to go back to the stable iOS version you were using before. Likewise, if you updated to the latest stable release but liked how iOS worked on the previous version.

Apple said goodbye to iTunes with the release of macOS Catalina, breaking up music, videos, and podcasts into their own respective apps, Music, TV, and Podcasts. But without iTunes, what app's in charge of interfacing with your iPhone? That would be Finder, and you use it to sync your iPhone, as well as back it up and archive backups for emergency restores.

Emoji have taken over the world, so there's a good chance you regularly use (or overuse) emoji on your iPhone's keyboard just like everyone else. But before emoji were popular, there were emoticons, short for "emotion icons" — and iOS has a secret emoticon keyboard just waiting for you to unlock.

Apple's Shortcuts app lets you make and use custom icons for any app on your iPhone, but it won't actually replace any icons. If your goal is to change the official icon for the app itself without any redirects, there's a growing list of third-party apps that'll let you do just that.

The screenshot tool on your iPhone can come in handy in various ways, but it may be even more helpful than you realize. So if you thought you knew everything there was to know about your iPhone's screenshot tool, it's time to put your knowledge to the test.

Apple's screenshot feature is a near-perfect tool for saving images of your iPhone's screen to keep for yourself or share with others. But iOS is missing one thing that would make it almost flawless: a way to rename your screenshots from their original IMG_1234.PNG file name.

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.

There's an iOS feature that benefits many users, but it's absolutely vital if you wear AirPods or other headphones models connected to your iPhone. A large number of iPhone users don't even know about it, especially since it's disabled by default and hidden deep in the system settings.

If you shoot videos with your iPhone in low-light situations, you may not always get the results you want. And that applies when recording video in 720p, 1080p, and even 4K resolutions. But there's an easy way to maximize your video's quality when filming in dark environments.

There are a surprising number of hidden features in your iPhone's Phone app, from secret dialer codes that provide info or perform actions to special characters that dial extensions automatically. However, there's one little-known trick every iPhone owner should know when using the Phone app for calls — and it's the simplest and most useful of them all.

Is the emoji you're using really the one you think it is? While you can use any emoji that looks like it fits what you have to say, it may have been created for a different purpose. On an iPhone, it's easy to find that purpose by retrieving the actual name of the emoji in Apple's operating system.

While there are many ways to see the exact battery life left on your iPhone, you can take all the work out of it by making your iPhone verbally tell you the current percentage every time you start or stop charging it. Best of all, this trick works whether you use wired or wireless chargers.

There's a feature hiding in your iPhone's Mail app you may have missed but should definitely know about. It gives you quick access to something you'd typically have to dig around in folders to find.

The App Library is an excellent tool for browsing all the apps on your iPhone, especially since it includes every one of the home screen bookmarks you've made for websites and shortcuts. But it's all the way past your last home screen page. If you have a lot of visible home screen pages, that's a lot of swiping to open the App Library. Luckily, there is a trick to accessing it faster.

Without realizing it, you may be giving away the GPS coordinates of your home, workplace, school, and other important or secret locations. Unless you've blocked the feature on your iPhone, location data is stored in almost every photo and video you take, and anyone you share the content with can find out where you are or were. But there are a few things you can do to safeguard the information.

When you look at your status bar on your iPhone, you'll almost always see the battery icon, which gives you an estimate of how much battery life you have left before you need to charge the device. What you won't always see is the exact battery percentage, but there are multiple ways to force it out of hiding.

Whenever you need to type out a fraction on your iPhone, whether in a message, word document, presentation, math problem, recipe, or wherever else you need it, it's easy to use numbers and slashes. But there's a way to make fractions look more professional and easier to read straight from your keyboard.

Apple's iMessage is one of the main reasons to use an iPhone, and there's a lot you can do in chats without being overly complicated. But there's one issue that continues to drive people nuts, and that's the blue typing bubble indicator with the moving ellipsis (•••). Can you stop it? Not officially, but there are workarounds.