iOS Tips and Tricks to Become a Power User - 2021 Edition

Over 100 iOS Tips and Tricks to turn you into a power user of your iPhone or iPad

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the original version of our iOS Tips article published in August 2021. We’ve created an expanded and updated version with 130+ tips including iOS 18 features that we recommend reading instead. This original version is maintained for reference purposes.

Android User? Never fear we have you covered as well with our Android Tip and Tricks to Become a Power User.

Tapping the clock/top bar on a page will take you quickly to the top.
Single tap on screen when phone is locked to wake it up
Swipe down from home screen to access spotlight
Drag your finger down from the white stripe at the bottom to use your iPhone with 1 hand(reachability)
When downloading or updating an app, tap its icon on the Home screen to pause downloading or long-press it for Prioritize, Pause, and Cancel actions
Upcycle an old iPhone.
Open your notes app > click on the + /camera button sign > scan documents.
@@ autofill replaces it with my email ( you will have to set this in text replacement)
You can lower your brightness further using the zoom function[easier way is this.. settings, accessibility, display & text size, reduce white point. I’ve also set this as my “accessibility shortcut” to reduce white point. Triple tapping the Siri button enables and disables it.]
your phone searches for cell towers every once in a while. If you got bad reception, it might be because your phone is clinging onto a more distant/worse cell tower. By turning airplane mode on, then off, you can manually force the phone to look for cell towers, and if there’s a one thats better than the old one if was clinging to, it’ll obviously connect to that tower and you get better signal
Under accessibility turn on led flash for notifications.
Turn on Low power mode and airplane mode to charge faster
⁠In Calculator, rotate to landscape to show the scientific calculator
In Notification Center, long-press the X button to show the Clear All Notifications action
On home screen press and hold to go to edit mode , there keep pressing and holding on one app icon and with other fingers tap other app icons and multiple apps will be selected which you can move to different pages on your home screen
Click and hold on the page indicator dots on home screen to open an overview of all pages at once , this can also be used to hide some of the pages
You can stop any audio playback (podcast, YouTube, Spotify…) after any length of time by setting a timer in the clock app and instead of a ringtone select :When timer ends – Stop playing
Double tap lock key to decline an incoming call
press lock button plus volume up quickly together for screenshot
On the lock screen , you can force press the torch/camera button to turn it on quickly( rather than clicking it for certain time)
In phone is unlocked and there is an incoming call swipe up to ignore it(it will still be there on upper left corner, you can bring back the interface by tapping it)
Without unlocking the phone , swipe the screen to left to quickly open camera , and swipe right to find widgets
You will have to tap and hold on torch button on screen to turn it on if phone is locked(on lock screen)
In calculator or dialer, you can delete the last number you typed with a swipe to the right or to the left.
Text expander can be used from the keyboard settings
Double click the upper case arrow to set caps lock
While typing if you hold spacebar and move , you can move the cursor anywhere
Enable double tap on back in settings and use it anything(preferably control centre)
Long Press in Safari/Edge to select test
Double tap in other apple apps to select text
Triple tap in other apple apps to select whole sentence
Three Finger Pinch in is Copy after selecting the test
Three finger Pinch in twice is cut on selected text
Double tap with three fingers to undo
Double tap with three fingers again to redo the same text
3 finger tap anywhere on the screen brings up Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste
Hold the ABC key and slide your finger to number row corresponding text row letter and let go and the number will be inserted and keyboard will stay in text mode only(generally you will have to press ABC type number and again press ABC to come back to text mode)
Multi-finger swipe up in app switcher will close multiple apps simultaneously
Use multiple fingers to swipe left in notification centre to cancel multiple notifications simultaneously
swipe left or right on the white bar at bottom of the screen to switch between apps
Some people find that swiping up and then right (in an arc) invokes multitasking faster
Swipe inwards from the left side of the screen as a universal back button.
In notes or in webpage -> click share -> Print -> Now in this print preview mode long press on the preview(then it will zoom little bit ) -> Then tap on it ..you will see that all pages are zoomed up and are fit to screen -> now again press share -> you will get always get PDF this way
Press and hold Volume up for burst photos in Camera app
In camera app while recording video , press and hold red button and slowly move it towards right to record specific time video[you have to hold the button in place to record for specific time….when you move that button to right … you can latch it there and you don’t have to hold it …. that can be used to add music to your video …. for example you can start a song on apple music and minimize it and then record a video using this method and your recorded video will have song at its back( without holding the button)]
In camera app Press down volume down key for specific time to shoot specific time video
Open any music app and minimize it and then open Camera app and start recording the video by pressing and holding on red button and moving it to right side slowly.
Be careful, actually there is no proofed solution to turn this off again! If you go into the phone app, and dial 3001#12345# and hit call, the “Field Test” application opens, which allows you to see the numerical value of your cellular reception, along with other information about the surrounding cell towers. In addition, if you hold down the power button until the “Slide to power down” slider comes up and then hold down the home button until the app exits, you can tap on the carrier name in the top left corner to change between the numerical value and the visual representation (in bars) without going into “Field Test” mode.
Double click the upper case arrow to set caps lock
In Mail, holding the “New Email” button will display all your recent drafts.
In safari long pressing + will give recently closed tabs
In safari while switching between tabs interface , swipe down to open mini search tab bar at top
In safari when in tab switching search bar , write any text and hold and press cancel button and then you can close all tabs matching with your text simultaneously
In Safari, tap with 2 fingers on a link to open it in background.
In safari , if you go to landscape mode and long press on a tab …you can arrange tabs by websites and some other options
If you want to search for a word on a page with safari, enter it in the web search box on the top right and scroll all the way down, past the suggestions until it says ‘on this page’.
If you long press a link in safari , it will show preview of that page right there by opening a small popup view
To record screen with phone audio as well as microphone audio , click on Screen recording button firmly from control centre and you will see screen recording UI , and you will also see microphone off there and click on it to turn it on and then click on start recording so everything will be recorded (Screen + microphone) ,,you can also mute yourself in the middle of recording by going to control centre again and turning off the microphone
when in markup for any document or picture, if you want to draw perfect circle or any other shape just draw a circular shape and hold the screen after drawing it for 4seconds and it will perfect the circle
In the iPhone accessibility turn on voice control and enable it and go to customize command and put your voice keyword(create new command..run custom gesture )and using that you can unlock your iPhone
go to camera setting and if you into selfie’s then turn mirror selfie camera to see the viewer showing exact feed as your photo will look after shooting(otherwise iPhone will show inverter image)
go to setting -> screen time settings -> app limit -> add anew limit for app you want -> set minimum value (1min) This way if we try to open it ..we can’t do that …so this is kind of a hack to lock apps in iOS
Go to a single contact and tap on edit their photo and you can create custom animoji for your contact
while unlocking the phone just wipe up rather than waiting for the phone unlock animation to work..if you swipe up the phone will unlock and the animation will take care of itself ..this will unlock the phone faster
if you want to lock your your photos with faceID , copy the photo and paste it in notes and lock the note with faceID
on safari if you take screenshot , there is one more tab on top which says full page….click on it and when you save it …it’s the whole page in pdf
if there is some website that doesn’t allow you to go back…long press the back arrow button in safari and that will open the previous sites list
Use the three dot menu in files app and from there you can scan a document just like you can do it from notes . the advantage of scanning it from files is that it will be automatically sync to i drive on the go and you don’t have to manually send the document
Open a note you are interested in and you can see date created and if you tap on it you can switch between date created and date edited
While holding spacebar to move your curser at the time of writing text …press on the keyboard at some other place with another finger and now move your original finger . you can select test like that without touching the text itself
If you go to files app and if you click on the name of a file , you can directly edit its name without long pressing any file and clicking rename
Long press on any photo in files app and save in pdf and you can convert any photo into pdf
while pulling down the notification centre from left side , when it is partially down we can use the torch shortcut
while using smart stack, a simple down gesture will change the widget in the stack, if we force and do a longer down gesture we can change 2 widgets in a single swipe
when in compose mail screen , in the keyboard if we press arrow on the right side of keyboard , it will show a menu where we can add attachments and. scan documents and add manual scribble note as well
while in notes app , if we press on search bar then we can select filters like ‘notes with attachments’ or ‘ notes with pictures’ etc
while a file being uploaded in iCloud and if you go in files app and see the file , you can see the amount of file actually uploaded in real time in the files app
while annotating the pdf , in lower right corner we can tap + and add multiple signatures , these signatures can be used on iPad as well or iPad signatures can be used in iPhone as well
we can add multiple signatures
while annotating the pdf , in lower right corner when we press + , we can also use the magnifier which can further be customized with its border color size and magnification strength
when we select a text and long press it , in the menu click on arrow > to see more options where we will get highlight option
While editing the text ,tap and press space and the text can directly be selected using finger movements of both those fingers
Press and hold top of the Apollo app to change theme form dark to light or vice versa. G
double tap of back action can be also triggered by double tap on side and we don’t necessarily tap the centre of back
in email or messages or notes ..touch an object with 2 fingers and move those fingers without lifting which will select multiple objects quickly
while multiple objects are selected don’t , lift one finger and top on upper right corner of screen and from current position to the topmost position all the items will be selected
when apps are in folder and there is notification to one of the apps from the folder …so to access that notification without tapping on folder , long press on that folder which will give the name of the app with notification and tap on that to directly address that notification
while on lock screen if we long press on the torch it will turn on , to turn it off quickly swipe from left and leave , the camera should be triggered and the torch will turn off quickly without long pressing the torch bitten
You can take screenshot and quickly open iMessage and drag that preview of the screenshot to specific person and send it , same with the videos
In the notes app , long press and select text from camera and you can point the camera towards any text and it will do auto OCR
Now we can mention #name like tags in the notes and these notes with similar tags can be sorted together
The tag based notes can be added to something called as Smart Folders in the notes app( which is visible while creating new folders)
Double tap control button to activate dictation quickly
calculator in landscape mode automatically turns into scientific calculator
you can write a flight name in notes app and click on it to see flight route EL215 ***(works in some areas)
On iOS 15 when we drag our finger from lower left corner we get to have a quick note and we can type and use Apple Pencil to write anything in it
If we swipe from lower left and give that quick note a direction it will go in different direction
In iOS 15 , when in any application if we swipe down on the multitasking three dot menu it automatically take current app in right side and now you can open another one
Globe key + a will open Dock , Globe + H will take you home , Globe + C will take control centre down
Globe + right / left arrow will cycle through currently running apps , Globe + up will open Xpose , Globe + Q will open quick note
Swipe down from App Library to get an alphabetical app list view
Now when a quick note is open and another app is open for example Apple Music or some browser window then we can quickly add those to the quick note so it is really useful for collecting different websites into a note for research purpose.
if we open a pdf and swipe from left side we will see all pages there and we can ping press and move the pages around
the left side swipe menu of the pdf can also be used to add new pages , delete pages .. scan pages on the go .. or add pages from different file using files application