iOS 14

Wireless emergency alerts help warn mobile phone users of imminent threats to life or property, such as extreme weather and natural disasters. These alerts target affected geographic areas and come with a loud sound scary enough to make you want to turn off emergency alerts altogether on your iPhone, but there's a way to keep emergency alerts without the ear-splitting, intrusive sound.

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.

When you need a file on your Mac as soon as possible, you usually have to get your MacBook or hop on your iMac, Mac mini, Mac Pro, or Mac Studio. But that's too much work if you're in bed, lying on the couch, or outside in the fresh air. Why even bother when you can access that file directly on your iPhone or iPad — without moving an inch?

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.

If you're anything like me, you use the Calculator app on your iPhone like fifty times a day, and you're sick of the same user interface it's had since iOS 11 came out. While you can't mod the button shapes and sizes, there is a way to breathe new life into your calculations with some Calculator theming.

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.

Home Screen widgets come in various sizes on iOS 14 and later, and which size you choose will depend on how much content or data you actually want to see. But what happens when you pick the wrong widget size? In a perfect world, you would just edit the current widget's settings, but Apple didn't make it that easy.

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.

Malevolent hackers can divert your incoming calls and texts to any number they want, and they don't need to be a criminal mastermind to do it. Even friends and family members can reroute your incoming calls and messages so that they know exactly who's trying to reach you, and all it takes is seconds of access to your iPhone or wireless account. These secret codes can help uncover them.

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.

Sure, you can remove apps from your iPhone's Home Screen without deleting them. But there's something satisfying about seeing them laid out and well-organized on the Home Screen, just a tap away, especially if you use user-selectable or custom icons for all your apps. Still, there may be days or situations when you want to hide apps without removing them entirely from the Home Screen.

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?

If you're sick of seeing some of your contacts' faces in the sharing menu every time you share photos, apps, webpages, or other content on your iPhone, or if you want to keep nearby eyes from sneaking a peek at the people you frequently share things with, you can make some or all of them disappear.

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.

When you take a screenshot on your iPhone, it's automatically saved to your Photos app. You can ignore the screenshot thumbnail or swipe it away, but you shouldn't. If you open the screenshot editor instead, you'll gain access to your iPhone's most useful screen capture tool: full-page screenshots.

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.

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.

You may know the traditional way to take a screenshot on your iPhone, but it may not be the best action for your needs. There are faster ways to capture an image of your iPhone's screen, methods for capturing overlays and other elements that won't show in regular screenshots, and even options for blocking screenshot thumbnail previews from appearing.

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.

Restoring your iPhone from a previous backup is still a simple process using your Mac, but the way it works has changed since Apple killed off iTunes with the macOS Catalina update. Now you must use Finder to both back up and restore your iPhone, which can take a little getting used to.

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.

In recent years, Apple has made it much easier to customize the Home Screen on your iPhone or iPad, and some of the newer tools are perfect for neat freaks. Nonetheless, a tidy Home Screen can still feel cluttered when iOS and iPadOS force widgets, apps, and folders to have names — but a few workarounds can help you remove some of those icon labels for good.

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.

Ringtones and text tones can be annoying, so my iPhone is almost always set to vibrate on silent mode. Unfortunately, that causes me to miss phone calls and text messages when the device isn't in my hands or pockets. While I hate missing alerts, I'm still reluctant to switch to ring mode — and that's where another iOS and iPadOS feature helps out.

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.

Apple has a secret iMessage effect so hidden that there's only one way to unlock it, and it's not by digging through the Messages app's settings, tools, effects, or interface. However, it's used the same way whether you're messaging from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, so it's easy to remember once you know.

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.

There's only one thing keeping hackers, thieves, law enforcement agencies, and maybe even the people you thought you could trust from breaking into your iPhone should they ever get possession of the device. Their odds of bypassing that thing are pretty good, but there's an easy way to make it an almost impossible feat.

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 are many ways to open up the media account settings for your Apple ID on your iPhone, but they all require two or more steps. However, there is a hidden trick Apple hasn't told anybody about that can get there in one, and it's not Siri.

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.

You may prefer reading news stories, web articles, and books on your iPhone over listening to them in spoken form. Still, sometimes it's necessary when driving, walking, cycling, cleaning, working, or performing other activities requiring a little multitasking. To help you out, Apple has a text-to-speech service on your iPhone — you just need to know how to find and set it up.

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.

There's a whole world of hidden iPhone features you might be missing out on, but this little-known tool for iOS is something you should definitely enable so that it's ready when you need it.

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.

It's easy to accumulate hundreds of Safari tabs on your iPhone, which makes hunting for specific tabs more difficult, especially when they're spread across different groups. Having too many tabs can even slow down Safari itself. You can close all tabs in a group quickly, but not if you want to save some. To prevent this mess, Safari can automatically weed out the tabs it thinks you don't need.