The Phone app on your iPhone has a surprising amount of hidden features, from secret dialer codes that provide information or perform actions to special characters that automatically make extensions. However, there is one little-known trick that every iPhone owner should know when using the Phone app to make calls – and it’s the easiest and most useful of them all.
Whenever you’re on a phone call and need to step away for a while, whether it’s to go to the bathroom to drown out a coughing fit or yell at someone in another room, you can press the microphone mute button on the phone’s interface so that the other person can’t hear you.
The problem with muting during a call is that you can still hear them. If it’s your intention to listen to them while you’re doing noisy activities and then unmute when it’s your turn to speak, hitting the mute button on the phone’s interface is perfect.
If you don’t want to hear them, such as when you need to leave a room and don’t want someone nearby to eavesdrop on another caller, there’s a better option: put the call on hold. The other party will not know that the call is on hold unless you inform them in advance, just as they will not know that you have muted yourself.
Putting a phone call on hold
The call interface doesn’t have a hold button, but that’s because it’s hidden behind a mute button. To activate it, press and hold the mute button until it turns into a hold button with a pause button in a circle. This works whether the sound is muted or not. To release a call from hold, tap the pause symbol.
This also works for FaceTime audio calls since it uses the same interface.
Can you play or listen to hold music?
When I said that the other person on the line won’t know when you put a call on hold, that’s mostly true. Very few wireless carriers—so few that I can’t even name a single one—allow you to turn on music hold for your account. If you’re one of the lucky ones, you can even customize the song or sound that plays while you wait. In this case, the other caller will catch.
Music on hold is primarily a business and corporate feature, so you’ll be hard-pressed to find any music-on-hold options on regular consumer cellular plans.
Some VoIP options, such as Google Voice, will play music on hold in certain situations. So if you’re talking to someone using the Google Voice app (who is most likely using Wi-Fi or mobile data), they might put the call on hold and you’ll hear the music on hold, but not them. If you put them aside and your operator doesn’t offer music on hold, no one will hear a single song.
If you want to get a Google Voice number for your iPhone to play music held by other callers, you’ll need to make sure Google Voice is set to make and receive calls over Wi-Fi and mobile data, and not just use your carrier. This will force you to use the Google Voice interface, which has a dedicated hold button. Otherwise it will divert your call and use the phone interface where you can still put the call on hold without music on hold. Other VoIP options will be similar.