Everything Else
How To: Automatically Turn on Speakerphone for Every iPhone Call
When you make or receive a call on your iPhone, you're forced to use the built-in ear receiver at the top of the phone to hear anything—unless you're already connected to a Bluetooth device. If you don't have Bluetooth in your car, or prefer to just use the speaker instead, having to manually switch to speaker mode can get annoying real fast.
How To: iOS 17.2 Includes 50 New URL Schemes You Can Use in Shortcuts on Your iPhone
The iOS 17.2 update for iPhone is a big one. Aside from huge new features like the Journal app, Contact Key Verification for iMessage, and a revamped TV app, there are 50 new URL schemes you can use in your self-created shortcuts.
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: Apple Has a Killer New Word Game Puzzle Called Quartiles on iOS 17.5
Apple's newest software update, iOS 17.5 includes one killer new feature for people who like word games: another lexical challenge to complement the crossword puzzles that Apple News already has.
How To: Get Apple's Live Fish Wallpapers Back on Your iPhone
Remember the live fish wallpapers from iOS 9? They may be a fading memory at this point since Apple removed them all from the iPhone in iOS 11, but there is a way to get those fishies animated on your device again. They'll be live photos for your lock screen, which is as good as it will get until Apple lets us use all its live wallpapers, new and old, one day, which will probably never happen.
How To: iOS 18 Lets You Change Widget Sizes on Your iPhone's Home Screen Without Deleting Them First
Apple's making it easier to change a widget's size on your iPhone's Home Screen, so you'll no longer have to delete widgets and add different-sized versions of them. With iOS 18, you can adjust a widget's size straight from its current widget size on your Home Screen. The new method also works on iPad with iPadOS 18.
How To: Your iPhone's Weather App Has a Crazy Number of Customization Options You Probably Didn't Know About
Apple's Weather app has been around forever, at least for iPhone, and it's gone through many design changes over the years. But we're at a point now where we can actually customize how the Weather app looks and feels in many different ways, some of which you probably haven't even considered.
How To: Drag-and-Drop Emails on Your iPhone to Notes, Reminders, and Other Apps in iOS 15
There has been drag-and-drop functionality for iPhone since at least iOS 11, but iOS 15 adds a new ability that makes essential emails even easier to find when you need them.
How To: The Simple Way to Enable Caps Lock on Your iPhone
When you need to type in all caps on a computer, you just press the "caps lock" key. But no such key seems to exist on iOS. The "shift" key appears to work at first but will deactivate once you type one capital letter. Holding down the shift key while you type gets the job done, but it's a pain. While it might not be obvious, enabling caps lock is actually really simple.
How To: Use This Trick to Quickly Select All Photos & Videos on Your iPhone to Bulk Delete or Share
With high-resolution photos and 4K videos being standard these days, it's no surprise that media hogs most of the storage space for many iPhone users. If that's you, there's always iCloud, but you only get 5 GB free, and a paid 50 GB or 200 GB plan can fill up fast. To save money and reclaim storage, you can just delete content from the Photos app, and there's a trick to doing it faster.
How To: Major iPhone Update Finally Lets You Manage Past Wi-Fi Networks and Even View Their Passwords
For years, Android has provided easy ways to view all the Wi-Fi networks you connected to in the past, and you can even see the saved passwords in plain text. With iOS 16, Apple finally gave us a similar way to view saved Wi-Fi hotspots, copy their passwords, and remove old ones without being near their access points.
How To: Prevent Notes on Your iPhone from Being Accessed by Others on Your iPad or Mac
If you store important, sensitive information on your iPhone in Notes, you'll want to be more careful. When Notes syncs across your iPad and Mac via iCloud — devices that family members or coworkers may share — you run the risk of having your notes read, edited, and deleted by other people. Such a catastrophe is easily avoided.
How To: Use Live Captions on Your iPhone for Real-Time Transcriptions of Any Audio — Calls, Videos, Podcasts, and More
With Apple's latest accessibility feature, you can get live transcriptions of anything you're listening to on or around your iPhone. Real-time captions work for phone calls, video conferences, FaceTime, music, podcasts, streaming media, movies, games, and more — even someone sitting right next to you talking.
How To: Change Your App Store Country to Download Region-Locked Apps & Games on Your iPhone
Before many games make it to the US-based iOS App Store, they get "soft launched" in a smaller country to get real-world testing for bugs. It's a pilot program, so to speak, as countries like Vietnam or the Philippines have far fewer iPhone users than the US, thus offer a more controlled environment for developers to get feedback and zero-in on issues that may occur in a game's early development phases.
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: The Fastest Way to Select Multiple Photos on Your iPhone
Whether it's to delete a few photos or share a bunch with another app, there are times when you need to select several pictures at once. This would usually be annoying since you'd have to tap every picture you wanted to select, but there's a much faster way to batch select.
VLC 101: How to Stream Videos from Your Favorite Cloud Storage Services on iPhone
If you have movies and videos stored on Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive, you should definitely be using the VLC app for iPhone. After setting a few things up, VLC will let you stream videos directly from any of these services with a proper video player UI, complete with gesture controls.
How To: Move App Icons Anywhere on Your iPhone's Home Screen Without Jailbreaking
Your iPhone's home screen is a tricky thing. You can sort your collection of apps in any order you'd like, but where you place those apps is a totally different story. App and folder placement follows a strict grid on iOS from left to right, top to bottom. No exceptions, and that's how Apple wants it. So you might think without a jailbreak you're stuck with this layout — but you're wrong.
How To: The Trick to Using Your iPhone's Portrait Mode in Other Photo and Video Apps
Your iPhone's Camera app isn't the only place you can use Portrait mode for selfies. An easy-to-miss feature built right into iOS lets app developers leverage Apple's powerful Portrait mode effect in their own apps, so you can add a shallow focus effect to photos and videos when using the front-facing camera in FaceTime and apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Zoom.
How To: Use Any Song on Your iPhone as a Gradually Increasing Alarm for a Gentle Wakeup
If you'd rather be gently relaxed out of bed instead of stressed out at loud alarm sounds, there are a few things you can do on your iPhone. One of your best options is to use carefully selected songs that start out calm and soothing and gradually increase in intensity and volume. But you could also use a more intense track you know will wake you up, only set to ascend in volume to ease you out of slumber.
How To: There's a Better Way to Zoom with Your iPhone's Camera
The iPhone 11 series models have sophisticated camera systems that include both a wide and ultra-wide lens. On top of that, the Pro models also have a telephoto lens. So you can zoom anywhere between 0.5x optically to 5x or 10x digitally, depending on the one you have. While you can pinch in and out on the screen to control the zoom, there's a way to get more granular control for photos.
How To: Safari's Private Browsing Mode Just Made Your Private Tabs Way More Private on iOS 17
Private Browsing mode finally lives up to its name in Apple's huge Safari 17 update for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. So whether you search for things you don't want anybody to know about or want to ensure websites and trackers aren't eavesdropping on your activity, you'll want to update your devices pronto.
How To: Easily Reveal Obfuscated Passwords Hidden Behind Asterisks & Dots for Login Pages in Safari
Enter a password into a password field, and it's a sure bet that black dots or asterisks will obscure the characters. Nearly every website you visit in Safari on your iPhone will do it, but sometimes it helps to see what you're typing or what was auto-filled with iCloud Keychain, LastPass, or a different password manager.
How To: Add Passes, Tickets, Rewards, Coupons, Gift Cards, IDs & More to Apple Wallet for iPhone
The Wallet app on your iPhone can be used to store and access event tickets, loyalty cards, boarding passes, gym memberships, airline miles, gift cards, coupons, and more — all in one centralized place. Before doing so, though, you must add your passes to Wallet, and there is more than one way to do it. However, not every pass can be added using all of the available methods.
How To: Fix the 'Number Changed to Primary' Bug on Your iPhone
The iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR aren't the newest devices from Apple Inc., but all three have a serious problem in Messages. When sending a friend an SMS/MMS text rather than an iMessage, the phrase "Number changed to Primary" appears in front of every message. What gives? If this issue is driving you mad, there are a few tricks that may exterminate the bug until Apple gets around to issuing a patch.
How To: Tired of Tapping? Use an External Keyboard on Your iPhone and Unlock Tons of Keyboard Shortcuts
Your iPhone goes with you everywhere, and its touchscreen interface is all you need to navigate and use all your installed iOS apps. But an external keyboard can make your iPhone an even more efficient tool for productivity tasks such as drafting long emails, composing detailed notes, and writing reports in your favorite text editor.
How To: iOS 18 Upgrades Your iPhone's Buttons with Eye-Catching Visual Effects
There are a lot of great features coming to your iPhone with iOS 18, but one of the coolest features is also one of the simplest and most satisfying— one that you'll notice every day you use your iPhone. And for now, it's an iPhone exclusive, so you won't get the same gratifying experience on an iPad with iPadOS 18.
How To: 20 Features the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro Models Have That Other iPhones Don't
Many of the iPhone 15, 15 Plus, 15 Pro, and 15 Pro Max features were carried over from last year's models. Still, quite a few capabilities are exclusive to the 2023 lineup, and some may be worth the upgrade.
How To: Remove the Annoying Photos Widget from Your iPhone's Today View to Stop Showing Potentially Embarrassing Pics
Apple's iOS 14 introduced a new world of iPhone customization thanks to its updated widgets that can live on both the home screen and Today View. While they're incredibly useful, they're not very interactive, they restrict what's shown, and you can't resize them afterward. However, those issues pale in comparison to the annoying Photos widget in Today View's auto-generated Smart Stack.
How To: Download Photos & Videos from Instagram Posts & Stories Using This Shortcut for iPhone
You don't need to take screenshots or make screen recordings to save photos and videos from other users on Instagram. While Instagram doesn't offer an official way to download others' posted content, dozens of shortcuts are available for iPhone that can do just that. But which one should you pick?
How To: Make Your iPhone Tell You When It's Done Charging
Battery management is a never-ending struggle. To be on the safe side, you likely won't want to leave your home with less than 100% battery, but continually checking your charging iPhone is a hassle. Instead of continuously monitoring your battery's power level, have your iPhone tell you when it's reached a full charge.
How To: 8 Shortcuts to Improve Your Instagram Experience on Your iPhone
Instagram has extensive tools built in for creating and editing posts and Stories, but there could always be more. Third-party apps can help you add photo and video effects for even more visually stimulating content, as well as create announcements, text-based images, and everything in between. However, now that Shortcuts exists on iOS, you may no longer need all those extra apps on your iPhone.
How To: Apple's Making Your iPhone's Reminders App Even Better with 10 New Features
Apple's improving its productivity tools for iPhone, and not just for apps like Calculator and Notes. The Reminders app is also getting a huge update.
How To: Scroll Hands-Free Through Long Webpages on Your iPhone to Read Articles at the Perfect Pace
You can't always have your hands on your iPhone, which is why Apple developed Siri. When Siri can't do your hands-free bidding, there's Apple's newer Voice Control feature. But if you don't like barking commands at your iPhone, there's another option — at least, when it comes to scrolling through webpages in Safari.
How To: Finding Parking Just Got Easier with Apple Maps on Your iPhone
When you need to drive somewhere unfamiliar, you probably use Apple Maps to get there if you're an iPhone user. But just getting there isn't enough sometimes. If you pull up to the location, and there's nowhere to park, it doesn't matter that you arrived on time since you'll be late trying to find somewhere to leave your car. That's where Apple's new Maps tool comes in handy.
How To: All the Ways to Get Water Out of Your iPhone's Speaker
Apple Watch owners know there's a built-in way to remove water from the device's speaker. However, even though modern iPhones are IP67 and IP68 water resistant, there's no official way to deal with water-clogged speakers that can muffle audio and cause prolonged damage if not ejected. Older iPhone models have it even worse, but there are some easy things you can do to get that water out.
How To: 23 New Photo Features for Your iPhone You Need to Know About on iOS 17
There are some important new features in the Photos app on iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 that will streamline editing, give your pets more recognition, help you learn about the world you've captured, and even add a bit of fun to your day. There are even a few hidden tricks that may surprise you.
How To: Auto-Play New Podcast Episodes on Your iPhone When Connecting Headphones, Starting a Trip, Tapping an NFC Tag & More
The Shortcuts app can help you play the next unlistened podcast from one of the shows, but getting the latest unplayed episodes from your whole queue of shows in the Podcasts app is a little trickier. There is an easy way to do it on your iPhone, though, and you can even automate it so that Podcasts plays your most recent untouched episode automatically.
How To: Use Siri to Play Spotify Music (All the Commands You Need to Know)
Finally, Spotify now works with Siri! It's been a long time coming, but as of Spotify Music version 8.5.6 for iOS 13, you can make Siri or Hey Siri on your iPhone play and control music in your Spotify account. But what commands can you use? We've built a list of everything you can tell Siri to do on Spotify right now, and as time goes on, the list may grow even more powerful.
How To: Print These iPhone XR, XS & XS Max Cutouts to See Which Size Is Right for You
Combined, the new iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max are the largest suite of iPhones that Apple has ever released at once time. While the XS remains the same size as last year's iPhone X, the XR and XS Max are even larger. But which size is right for you? We can help you decide which will fit your hand best with printable cutouts to compare the sizes of Apple's latest and greatest.