iOS & iPhone Features

How To: Find & Recover Apple Notes Stored in Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, AOL & Other Third-Party Mail Accounts

If you can't locate a specific entry in the Notes app on your iPhone, chances are that it's hiding in a different place than you thought, connected to a third-party email service such as Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook. When one of those notes gets lost or accidentally deleted, you're going to run into issues, but it's possible to recover it.

How To: There Are 18 New Features Hiding in Your iPhone's Camera App on iOS 17

The Camera app on your iPhone includes new features with the iOS 17 update that will help you take better photos and more impressive videos, but there are a lot of cool new things available that you might not see right away.

How To: Figure Out Your Total Calorie Burn in Apple's Health App

If you transition to an Apple Watch from another wearable like Fitbit, you might be a bit confused by the new calorie burn counter. Instead of ending your day with thousands of calories burned, your watch says you've burned just hundreds. Could it be you're less active with your Apple Watch? Probably not. It's more likely because of the different way the watch counts your calories.

How To: Silence Annoyingly Loud Emergency Alerts on iPhone Without Disabling Them Completely

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.

How To: Disable iOS 17's Live Voicemail on Your iPhone's Incoming Call Screen

Apple's Live Voicemail lets you preview what an incoming caller is speaking to your voicemail system in real time. It's a revolutionary feature like Visual Voicemail on the original iPhone, only better since it helps you screen calls to quickly decide whether to answer or ignore callers. It's similar to answering machines, whose popularity peaked in the mid-90s, but you quietly read transcribed messages instead.

How To: Apple's Reminders App Has the Ultimate Solution for Managing Grocery Lists on Your iPhone

If you couldn't pick between putting your grocery list in the Reminders or Notes app, there's now a clear place for it. With the latest software updates, the Reminders app, which now supports sections, sports a groceries template that automatically moves the items you add to related categories to help you better find products in-store.

How To: The Simple Trick to Stop Your iPhone from Automatically Going to Sleep

You're halfway through reading an article on your iPhone, when the display just turns off. Frustrated, you open the article again, only for the display to go black again. You shouldn't have to keeping touching the screen to keep your iPhone from going to sleep. Luckily, you can delay or even stop your iPhone from doing so with just a few taps.

How To: There's an Easy Way to Type Fractions as Single Characters on Your iPhone's Keyboard

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.

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: Two Settings You Should Double-Check to Make Sure Your iPhone's Alarm Goes Off

It happens to almost everyone. You wake up one morning, check your phone, and realize your alarm never went off. Now you're late to start the day, and you spend every night onward paranoid it'll happen again. But if you have an iPhone, there are two things you can check to make sure the alarm always goes off on schedule.

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: Add Custom Shortcuts to Your iPhone's Share Sheet & Reorganize Them for Quicker Access

With Shortcuts, Apple has designed a way to create your own tools and automations right on your iPhone. And to top it off, your creations can be accessed in a variety of ways, including Siri phrases, widgets, and the Shortcuts app itself. Perhaps even more useful is adding them as custom actions to your Share Sheet and making them available to you system-wide.

How To: Disable iOS 12's Annoying Password Creation Feature on Your iPhone

Maybe you prefer writing passwords in a notebook. Maybe you like creating your passwords yourself. Whatever the case, you don't like iOS 12's new automatic password generator, and you don't need it to pop up every time you enter a new password in Safari or a third-party app. Lucky for you, iOS 12 lets you disable the feature altogether. Unfortunately, that perk comes with a catch.

How To: Change Your iPhone's Default Text Responses for Incoming Phone Calls to Quick Reply in Style

Since iOS 6, "Respond with Text" has allowed us to quickly respond to a call we can't (or don't want to) answer. But Apple only gives you three options to choose from, and if you don't have time to type out your own response, those three might not cut it. Luckily, you can customize these three replies to whatever you want.

How To: Safari for iPhone Lets Advertisers Track Your 'Clicks' — Here's How to Disable It

Apple wants to support the advertising economy, but its primary focus of late has been user privacy and security. In Safari, cross-site tracking, which lets content providers track you across websites and apps to show you more targeted ads, is disabled by default. However, content providers can get around that using less privacy-invasive ad measurements, but you can stop that too in iOS 14.5.

How To: The Hidden Action That Opens Apple Pay from Your iPhone's Lock Screen

I think everyone with an iPhone should be making every purchase they can with Apple Pay. I also think everyone who uses Apple Pay should open the Wallet app ahead of time, instead of simply tapping their iPhone to the card reader. But there's a much faster way to open Wallet than slogging through the sea of apps on your iPhone. You can open it right from the lock screen.

How To: 23 Things Your iPhone's Volume Buttons Can Do Besides Volume Adjustments

The volume buttons on the side of your iPhone can do more than just adjust the volume levels for media, ringers, alerts, Siri, and other sounds and voices. You can use them to perform different actions in certain apps and even create custom actions using the Shortcuts app. It's not exactly button mapping, but it's as close as you'll get without jailbreaking iOS.

How To: All the Apps That Work with Picture in Picture (PiP) on Your iPhone

Since iOS 9, the iPad has had Picture in Picture mode, which lets you minimize a video that you're watching into a floating overlay so that you can multitask in other apps while it plays. For iPhones, it came a little later, first appearing in iOS 14. It's not just for the Plus or Max displays either — any size display works.

How To: This Is What Happens to Your iPhone Every Time You Turn On Low Power Mode

When you enable Low Power Mode on your iPhone, it's not always clear what measures it's taking to reduce battery drain and conserve power. Changes to energy-hungry features you use daily may be immediately noticeable, but some things you use frequently may be disabled or reduced without any apparent indicators.

How To: There's Finally a Way to Disable Those Annoying Memoji Stickers in Messages on iPhone

There's a lot to love about iOS 13. Permanent Memoji stickers though? Not so much. Whether you love or hate these personalized icons, most of us can probably agree it's super annoying Apple doesn't let you disable them in the "Frequently Used" section of the Emoji keyboard. Every time you go to use an emoji, you have to see the stickers, whether you want to or not. That is, until now.

How To: The Easiest Way to Resize Photos on Your iPhone in Bulk or Individually

The rear cameras on iPhones have remained at 12 megapixels since the iPhone 6s, but with each new iPhone model, more data is going into photos. That means larger file sizes. If you're running into issues with your pictures being too large, whether you're sharing or uploading them, there's an easy way to resize an image or group of images using a shortcut.

How To: Everything You Need to Know About Your iPhone's Focus Feature — From Creating and Editing Focuses to Automating Them

In iOS 15, Apple unveiled a new feature called Focus, an extension of Do Not Disturb that lets you focus on the one thing that's important at any particular moment. It does so by minimizing distractions from your iPhone and other Apple devices, but there's a lot you should know about setting up and using Focus on your iPhone or iPad before you dig in.

How To: Stop Notification Banners from Popping Up for Custom App Icon Shortcuts on Your Home Screen

Users on Android could customize their app icons for some time, but it's a relatively new addition to the iPhone. You could change icons since iOS 12, but it really took off in iOS 14 and got even better in iOS 14.3. Still, it's not as easy as on Android, and you'll see a notification every time you open an app with your custom icon. However, there is a workaround to stop those annoying notifications.

How To: Type Curse Words with Apple's QuickPath Swipe-Typing Keyboard in iOS 13

The iPhone's autocorrect feature is wonderful and convenient, but it doesn't always work with informal language like profanity. If you've ever used the F-word, there's a good chance you've had your curse words "corrected" to other words that don't ducking make sense. And with the release of iOS 13, swearing in your messages and on social media could get a little harder.

How To: Sync Your iPhone Reminders in iCloud & Other Accounts Across All Your Apple Devices

Apple's iCloud is a fantastic way to ensure that all of your photos, messages, notes, and other important data are backed up and appear on all of your connected devices. However, you may have information like reminders attached to accounts other than iCloud, which won't appear when signing into iCloud on a new device. Here's how to get the full picture of where your reminders are stored.

How To: Switch from Grid to List View for Apps on Your iPhone's Home Screen in iOS 14

The average iPhone user has between 60 to 90 applications installed. On one of my devices, I have over 600. With a ton of apps to sort through, it can sometimes be challenging to find the one you're looking for without having to use the Search tool (which is even better in iOS 14). Even then, you may still come up dry.