Check out our new video tutorial for useful iPhone tips, tricks, and secret features like downloading any video, getting accurate battery information, and more.
Video: 14 iPhone Tips, Tricks, and Hidden Features
To help iPhone owners discover some of the great features of iOS 16, we asked our videographer Michael Billig (@michael_billig) to make a video about this. In the fifteen-minute video embedded at the top, Michael demonstrates over a dozen iPhone tips, tricks, and secret or hidden features.
From the default settings you’re encouraged to change, to the essential shortcuts you can download and install – and beyond – here are fourteen underrated iOS 16 features every iPhone owner should know and use.
How to Use These Secret iPhone Features
- Text Replacement: In Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement, set up phrases and their keyboard shortcuts so you can type something like “omw”and it will automatically expand to “On my way!”
- Scheduled dark mode: Let iOS automatically turn on dark mode for you by going to Settings → Display & Brightness, then select Options under the Appearance heading to create a dark mode schedule.
- Focus-Specific Home Screens: In settings, select a focus and any home screens that will be available on your phone and/or watch when that focus is active.
- Spotlight: When searching with Spotlight, you can drag any app from the search results to the home screen. It’s an even better way to quickly add an app to your home screen than dragging it from the App Library.
- Drag and Drop on iPhone. In apps like Photos, select an image and drag it around a bit, then tap one or more other images to create a group. Without lifting your finger, swipe up with another finger to go to the home screen, switch to another app like Pages, and simply drag and drop your images there.
- Secret tools for taking screenshots. When you take a screenshot, tap the thumbnail in the bottom left to bring up the Screenshot tool, then tap the + (plus) icon in the bottom right to access the edition’s many editing tools.
- Detailed battery information. To get a better idea of your iPhone’s battery health, install the “Battery Statistics “shortcut. After that, follow the instructions in the video to get a more detailed and accurate overview of battery capacity.
- Download any video: iOS makes it harder to save videos. Grab the Download Video shortcut and install it on your phone to be able to save any video in the Photos app, be it a YouTube video, a TikTok clip, and so on.
- Quick Bluetooth connections: Instead of going to Settings → Bluetooth every time you want to connect to a Bluetooth device, open Control Center, touch and hold the network card to raise it a little, and then touch and hold the Bluetooth icon to get a list of nearby devices that you can connect to.
- Instantly add a song to the Up Next list: Swipe from left to right on a song to instantly add it to the Up Next queue with haptic feedback. It’s much faster than touching and holding a song to bring up a context menu with an “Add to Next”option.
- Find cool shortcuts: In the Shortcuts app, go to the Gallery tab in the bottom right corner to find a long list of shortcuts from Apple and third-party apps, grouped by use case like Photography, Essentials, Favorites, and others.
- Change Defaults: Make your life easier by enabling these toggles in Settings: “Battery Percentage”under “Battery”; General tactile sensations → Sounds and tactile sensations → Keyboard feedback; and Forward text messages in the Messages section.
- Customize settings for the Music app. In Settings → Music, adjust the audio quality settings for Wi-Fi and cellular streaming, automatic downloads, spatial audio, lossless audio, offline cache size (Storage Optimization), equalizer settings, and more.
- “What song is this?”: Apple platforms integrate the Shazam engine so you can ask Siri to name the song. Even better, add Shazam to Control Center under Settings → Control Center so you can identify the songs being played in apps. To view the history of recognized songs, touch and hold the Shazam icon in the Control Center.
These are fourteen iOS 16 features that we think every iPhone owner should take advantage of to improve their experience. You may be familiar with some of them – and we are quite happy with that. We’d love to hear about your list of secret iPhone features, so share it with other readers in the comments below.