iOS & iPhone How-Tos
How To: Easily Lock Any App on Your iPhone or iPad Behind Passcode or Biometric Authentication
Some iOS and iPadOS apps give you an option to lock them behind Face ID, Touch ID, or a passcode, but there aren't many.
How To: Apple Just Made Its Controversial iMessage Editing Tool in iOS 16 Less Problematic
Apple's controversial iMessage-editing feature in iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS 13 Ventura is now less likely to be abused by malicious users.
How To: Get iOS 16's Live Weather Lock Screen Wallpaper on Your iPhone in iOS 15
Apple's bringing big changes to your iPhone's lock screen in iOS 16, and one of those changes lets you pick an always-updating wallpaper for your local weather conditions. If you don't want to wait until the fall for the stable iOS 16 version and don't want to install any iOS 16 betas, you can still get an always-updating weather wallpaper for your lock screen on iOS 15.
How To: 7 Things You Need to Know About iOS 15.6 for iPhone, Which Includes Over 35 Security Patches
After nearly two months of beta testing, Apple is finally pushing the iOS 15.6 software update to all iPhone users. While it's not as feature-rich as the iOS 15.5 or iOS 15.4 that came before it, there are still a few things you'll want to know about it.
How To: Watch YouTube Videos Using Picture in Picture on Your iPhone or iPad
Apple has given third-party developers access to Picture in Picture on iPad since iOS 9 and, more recently, on iPhone since iOS 14, but YouTube has been one of the few not to support the feature outside of Safari or premium memberships. Thankfully, that's no longer the case if you live in the U.S.
How To: There's an Easy Way to See All the Unsent Messages in Your iMessage Conversations
While you can quickly see the edit history of a modified iMessage in the Messages app, there's no way to view an iMessage that somebody in the conversation deleted unless you happened to see it before it disappeared. But that's only true if you didn't implement these security measures on your iPhone.
How To: Get Apple's Very First iPhone Wallpaper on Your Home or Lock Screen
When the very first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs in 2007, it sported a clownfish wallpaper throughout the keynote presentation — a wallpaper that never actually ended up on any iPhone models. Now, 15 years later, it's finally made its appearance in the latest iOS 16 beta. If you don't want to run beta software, you can still download the wallpaper for whatever iOS version you use.
How To: 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Install iOS 16 on Your iPhone Just Yet
You may be tempted to install the iOS 16 developer beta on your iPhone to try all the exciting new features it has to offer, but it may be a good idea to wait if you only have your personal iPhone that you use every day.
How To: Get Rid of Frequently Visited Websites in Safari on Your iPhone, iPad, or Mac
Safari has a helpful feature that shows your most frequently visited webpages whenever you open a new tab or window, but it's not for everyone. If you never use it, would rather have a minimalist start page, or want to prevent other people with access to Safari on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac from seeing the websites you frequent the most, you can get rid of it.
How To: Use This Trick to Fake Dropped Calls on Your iPhone When You Don't Want to Talk Anymore
You see it in the movies all the time. A character on the phone doesn't like what the other person is saying or telling them to do, or they just don't want to talk to them anymore, so they fake bad reception and cut the call off. In real life, it's pretty easy to tell when someone is doing it, and there are better ways to end a call abruptly so that it looks like you didn't hang up on them.
How To: Downgrade iOS 16 Beta to iOS 15 or Revert iPadOS 16 Beta to iPadOS 15
Beta software can be exciting because you get to experience cool new features before most other people. But it can have unwanted consequences such as bugs, UI glitches, and horrible battery life that'll make you wish you never installed it. If that sounds like you with iOS 16 beta or iPadOS 16 beta, you can downgrade to iOS 15.5 or iPadOS 15.5 for a more stable user experience.
How To: Change the Default Snooze Time on Your iPhone's Alarm Clock
While hitting snooze won't help you much if you fall back asleep, it can help you wake up more gently. However, your iPhone's default nine-minute snooze may be too long or too short for your preferences. If you tend to fall back asleep quickly, you might be better with a two-minute snooze.
How To: These Hidden Gestures Can Instantly Undelete Emails for You on Your iPhone or iPad
It's easy to start panicking when you delete an important email, but it's even easier to undo the mistake on your iPhone or iPad. You can retrieve an accidentally deleted email instantly on iOS and iPadOS with the help of a hidden gesture, and you'll be much more efficient with the Mail app once you learn how to use it.
How To: Snap Photos on Your iPhone Hands-Free for Better Selfies, Group Shots, and Low-Light Pictures
You can take a photo on your iPhone with just one tap or press, but you can also use the Camera app hands-free for more impressive images. Doing so lets you take more detailed selfies, include your whole group in the frame, or get steadier results in Night mode — and it's easy to accomplish. Spoiler alert: using "Hey Siri" is not enough.
How To: How Your iPhone Can Help You Read Faster with a Bionic Reading App
Apple News. Facebook. Twitter. Reddit. LinkedIn. These are just a few of the apps you probably have on your iPhone or iPad that keep you up to date on today's events. Unfortunately, they can also cause information overload. But a new viral speed-reading tool thinks it can help you process your daily news more efficiently.
How To: Scroll Through TikTok Hands-Free on Your iPhone or iPad Using Simple Voice Commands
If you can't curb your TikTok obsession, at least make it more efficient by taking your hands out of the equation. So when you're eating breakfast, working on your computer, or using your hands for another non-TikTok task, you don't even have to touch your iPhone or iPad to scroll through all of those videos in your feed. Instead, you can just tell it what to do, and it'll listen.
How To: Make Your iPhone Speak Its Battery Level Every Time You Start or Stop Charging
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.
How To: Remember These Popular App Store Games? They're Still Alive to Play Today
The App Store has been around for almost 14 years now, and during that time, we must have seen over a million games come and go and stay and expand. But only a tiny fraction of those games have become blockbuster sensations because of the mighty App Store's reach on iPhone and iPad, and many of the first big hits are still alive today for you to relive the good ol' days of mobile gaming.
How To: The Easiest Way to Secretly Record Someone's Conversation with Your iPhone
Your iPhone's built-in Voice Memos app is a great way to record the audio around you, whether it be conversations, lectures, meetings, interviews, discussions, chitchat, gossip, or other kinds of talks. But if your goal is to record audio on the down-low without being noticed, you'll need to know the hidden shortcut.
How To: 15 Important Features and Changes in the iOS 15.5 and iPadOS 15.5 Updates
Apple's latest iPhone and iPad software, iOS 15.5 and iPadOS 15.5, became available on May 16, so you can download and install it right now if you haven't already. While there aren't as many new features as iOS 15.4 and iPadOS 15.4 had, there are a few big ones in the U.S. you'll want to know beyond Apple's minuscule "About this Update" information in the "Software Update" menu.
How To: The Trick to Managing iCloud Contact Groups Right from Your iPhone (Since Apple's Contacts App Won't Let You)
You can view and hide iCloud contact groups on your iPhone, but Apple won't let you create or delete groups or add or delete contacts from any groups unless you're on a tablet or computer. Why Apple refuses to add a group management tool to Contacts on iOS is anybody's guess, but there is a workaround you can use instead.
How To: Use a Custom Gesture to Clear All Apps from Your iPhone's App Switcher in Seconds
After just a few hours, your iPhone's app switcher can become cluttered and even chaotic enough that you won't even want to use it. If you like your app switcher clean and tidy, with only your current session's apps accessible, there's a trick to force-quitting all apps simultaneously rather than one by one.
How To: 11 Ways to Show the Battery Percentage Indicator on Your iPhone
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.
How To: Get Water Out of Your iPhone's Speaker with a Simple App
Whether you drop your iPhone into a toilet or your dog's water bowl or regularly take it into the shower or pool, water will likely become nestled inside its speaker grilles. Water exposure causes audio playback through the speakers to soften and sound muffled, and getting that water out is no easy task. Luckily, there's an app for that.
How To: Send Full-Screen Memoji Explosions in iMessage Chats from Your iPhone or iPad
A simple trick in the Messages app for iOS and iPadOS can make your iMessage conversations more fun for you and your recipients by sending a full-screen blast of any Memoji sticker you choose.
How To: Find the Version Number for Any App on Your iPhone or iPad — Even Stock Apple Apps
From time to time, you may need to locate the version and build number for a particular app on your iPhone or iPad, but it's not at all obvious where you can find the information. Well, there's more than one place to look on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, but none are perfect solutions. Knowing each method will ensure you can always find any app's real version number.
How To: Every iPhone User Should Know These Hidden Moves in Apple's Messages App
The Messages app for iOS and iPadOS has a lot of hidden features, but one in particular can save you time and energy whenever you need to forward or copy and paste messages from within an SMS, MMS, or iMessage conversation.
How To: 11 Hidden iOS Features You Won't Find in Any Apple Docs
There are many things your iPhone or iPad can do, and Apple does an excellent job of documenting everything on its website. But there are some features that won't show up in any Apple manuals or help pages.
How To: Hide All App, Folder, and Widget Names on Your iPhone or iPad's Home Screen
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.
How To: Really Browse the Web Privately and Anonymously on Your iPhone or iPad
In the 21st century, we're all looking for ways to stay private, especially on our electronic devices. We have big tech corporations, enemy countries, malicious hackers, and other prying eyes watching our every move, so it's only natural to want to limit what they can see. Making your web browsing experience on iPhone and iPad more private is one way to do that.
How To: Every App You Can Use FaceTime's SharePlay Feature with Right Now
SharePlay is arguably one of the most significant features to hit FaceTime since group calls, and it's still hard to find apps that support shared experiences in FaceTime. Apple does list a few apps, but there is no official index of all the apps with SharePlay integration. That's where we come in.
How To: Always-Updated List of Apps That Let You Change Their Home Screen Icons on Your iPhone
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.
How To: Use These Price Trackers to Find On-Sale and Newly Free Apps for Your iPhone or iPad
To the end user, mobile apps are sometimes expensive. To the developers, those costs are justified for all the hard work put into making the apps. Sometimes app creators will meet in the middle by putting their apps on sale or giving them away for a limited time to gain more traction in the App Store.
How To: See Passwords for All the Wi-Fi Networks You've Connected Your iPhone To
Your iPhone goes with you pretty much everywhere you go, and unless you have unlimited data on your cellular plan, you've probably connected to dozens of Wi-Fi hotspots over the years. Wi-Fi passwords are saved to your iPhone so you can auto-connect to the router or personal hotspot again, but finding the plain text password for a network hasn't always been easy.
Pro Tip: There's a Hidden Way to Wipe Your iPhone to Get a New Passcode When You're Locked Out
Have you ever been locked out of your iPhone? Maybe you forgot your passcode. Or perhaps someone with access changed the passcode as a prank. Your iPhone's display could have even been damaged and unresponsive. Whatever the reason, there's an easy way to get back access to your iPhone the next time it happens.
How To: This Is Siri's New Gender-Neutral Voice in Apple's iOS 15.4 for iPhone
The last time the English language for Siri received new voices was in iOS 14.5, and there was one new male and one new female selection, bringing the total to four available options. In the iOS 15.4 update, there's a fifth one, and it may work better as a gender-neutral middle ground between the low-pitched male voices and high-pitched female ones.
How To: Reset Safari's Experimental Features to the Defaults to Fix or Troubleshoot Browsing Issues
Safari's advanced experimental features give you access to new browser initiatives, upcoming web tools, element changes, behavior adjustments, and other preliminary feature tests in development by Apple. If you use them on your iPhone, you can either improve your Safari experience or wreck it. Resetting the flags provides a fresh start.
How To: Face ID Works with Masks Now So You Can Unlock Your iPhone Faster
It's 2022, and the coronavirus pandemic is still going strong, meaning many people still wear masks. If that's you, unlocking your iPhone with Face ID is still very inconvenient when donning a face covering — until now.
How To: Prevent 'Running Your Automation' Notifications for Shortcuts on Your iPhone in iOS 15.4
For most Shortcuts automations you create on your iPhone, you'll get a "Running your automation" notification every time the task is automatically triggered. If you find those alerts annoyingly unnecessary, there's a less-than-ideal workaround to blocking them, but Apple gives us a better option in its iOS 15.4 update.
How To: 43 Cool New iOS 15.4 Features for iPhone — App Updates, Hidden Changes, and More!
Apple's iOS 15.4 update for iPhone is out after 46 days of beta testing, and it has some exciting features you won't want to miss. Here's everything you need to know about the new software.