iOS & iPhone Features

How To: It's Easy to Stop Apps from Automatically Updating on Your iPhone

Since iOS 7, your iPhone automatically updates all of your apps, which is a wonderful thing ... until it's not. Not only does this feature drain the battery quicker when enabled, it can also bring changes to features, settings, and user interfaces in the apps that you already know and love. That's why you can easily disable the feature and stop apps from automatically updating.

How To: Make a custom ringtone for your iPhone using iTunes

This video will show you how to make a custom ringtone for your iPhone using iTunes. Do the following to get a custom ringtone for your iPhone: You need to edit the song of your choice to 35 seconds or less. Convert it to a .m4a file, and rename that file as .m4r. Now all you need to do is drag the file into the ringtone section of iTunes and you now have a custom ringtone.

How To: Get the Most Value from Your iPhone Trade-In

Phones these days are expensive. The iPhone 11 Pro is presumed to start at $999, following the iPhone XS and iPhone X's leads. One way to bring down that cost is to trade in your old iPhone, but there isn't one clear-cut way to do that. You could trade your iPhone into a participating website or put yourself out there and sell the iPhone on your own. It's all about what's best for you.

News: Get 50GB of FREE Storage on Your iOS Device with Box

This morning Box released new versions for iPhone and iPad apps, and with them, a nice little surprise in the way of free stuff. Users who sign up within the next month will be gifted 50 GBs of cloud storage. This is a huge upgrade from their standard 10 GBs, and should be more than enough for most of us. In addition to the storage give away, the app includes a new UI, preview support, commenting, and other upgrades.

News: Apple Released iOS 12.1 Public Beta 2 to Software Testers with New Emoji & Chargegate Fix

Public beta testers will be pleased to know that the second iOS 12.1 beta has just become available for iPhones. The Tuesday, Oct. 2 update features an impressive 70+ new emoji for testers to enjoy, including bald emoji, emoji with red hair, gray hair, and curly hair, among many others, as well as a patch for iPhone XS and XS Max devices suffering from charging issues.

How To: Add a Dock to Your iPhone's Lock Screen to Quickly Access Favorite Apps

Apart from the flashlight, camera, and apps you access via notifications, widgets, location-based alerts, and the Control Center, there's no way to open other apps straight from the lock screen that you use frequently. If you have a jailbroken device, however, you can remedy this and add the home screen's Dock to the lock screen to get into your go-to apps even quicker.

How To: Hide Any Album on Your iPhone for a Cleaner, More Private Photos App

The "Albums" tab in Photos is great for sorting through the images and videos on your iPhone since you can narrow things down by your recent pics and recordings, apps used, media types, people, places, and so on. If you never look at all of those folders, however, it could feel like an overwhelming cluttered mess. Plus, there may be some collections you don't want others to see.

News: It Looks Like iOS 10 Will Finally Let You Remove Apple's Crappy Stock Apps

It looks like Apple is finally going to do something to address all of the complaints about their unremovable stock apps clogging up people's home screens. While bloatware is a bigger problem on Android where you have to deal with apps from Google and carriers, an iPhone can still get pretty cluttered with all those stock Apple apps. I mean, just look at all this crap... AppAdvice noticed two new keys in the iTunes metadata that strongly suggest that you'll be able to get rid of stock apps on...

How To: You Don't Need a New iPhone to Take Live Photos

Since Live Photos are nothing more than a glorified, built-in GIF generator on the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to get this "exclusive" feature on an older iPhone. While taking a Live Photo does eat up a lot of processing power, which the A9 chips can handle perfectly, older iPhones can still manager fairly well—no 3D Touch needed. You just need a jailbroken iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to do it.

News: Apple Just Released iOS 13.5 Public Beta 2 for iPhone, Includes COVID-19 Exposure Notification API

If you're a public beta tester, you woke up this morning with your iPhone running iOS 13.4.5. Today, Apple released the second beta for iOS 13.5. No, Apple didn't skip a version — 13.5 public beta 2 is essentially 13.4.5 public beta 2. So why the name change? Apple included the first API for its joint COVID-19 contact-tracing and exposure notification program with Google.