Watch our video walkthrough to learn about cool iPhone tips, tricks, and secret features, such as downloading any video, getting precise battery info, and more.
To help iPhone owners uncover essential iOS features, we asked our videographer, Michael Billig, to create a dedicated video. In the fifteen-minute walkthrough embedded above, Michael highlights over a dozen iPhone tips, tricks, and hidden features.
From default settings you might want to tweak to essential shortcuts you can download—and more—here are fourteen underrated iOS features every iPhone user should know and make use of.
For your convenience, these tips are also outlined below.
1. Text replacements
Go to iPhone or iPad Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement, and set up phrases and their shortcuts so you can type something like “omw” and have it automatically expanded to “On my way!”
2. Scheduled Dark Mode
Have iOS automatically turn on Dark Mode for you by going to Settings → Display and Brightness, then turn on Automatic and choose Options to create a schedule for Dark Mode.
3. Focus-specific Home Screens
In Settings, choose a focus and select any Home Screens to be available on your phone and/or watch when this focus is active.
4. Spotlight
When searching using Spotlight, you can drag any app from search results and drop it onto your Home Screen. This is an even better method to quickly add an app to the Home Screen than dragging it out of the App Library.
5. Drag and drop on iPhone
In apps like Photos, select an image and drag it a bit, then touch one or more other images to create a bundle. Without lifting your finger, swipe up with another finger to go to the Home Screen, switch to another app like Pages, and just drop your images there.
6. Secret screenshotting tools
When you take a screenshot, touch the thumbnail in the bottom-left corner to bring up the Screenshot tool, and then hit the plus icon (+) in the bottom-right corner to access a myriad of editing tools.
7. Detailed battery information
For a deeper insight into the battery health of your iPhone, install the Battery Stats shortcut. With that done, follow the instructions in the video to get a more nuanced, more accurate overview of your battery capacity.
8. Download any video
iOS makes it challenging to save videos. Grab the Download Video shortcut and install it on your phone to be able to save any video to the Photos app, be it a YouTube video, a TikTok clip, and so on.
9. 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 pop it up a bit, and then tap the Bluetooth option to get a list of nearby devices you can connect to. You can also add the single Bluetooth icon to iOS 18 Control Center and touch and hold it to connect to a nearby device.
10. Instantly add a song to Up Next
Swipe from left to right across a song to add it instantly to your Up Next queue with haptic feedback. This is way faster than having to touch and hold a song to bring up the contextual menu with the Add to Up Next option.
11. Find cool shortcuts
In the Shortcuts app, hit the Gallery tab in the bottom-right corner to find a long list of shortcuts from Apple and third-party apps grouped by use cases like Photography, Essentials, Featured, and more.
12. Change defaults
Make your life easier by turning on these toggles in Settings:
- Battery Percentage in the Battery section
- Vibration on each key press in Sounds & Haptics → Keyboard Feedback → Haptic
- Text Message Forwarding in the Messages settings
13. Adjust the Music app settings
In Settings → Apps → Music, adjust settings for audio quality for Wi-Fi and cellular streaming, automatic downloads, spatial audio, lossless audio, offline cache size (Optimize Storage), equalizer settings, and more.
14. “What’s that song?”
Apple platforms integrate the Shazam engine, so you can ask Siri to name a song. Better yet, add Shazam to Control Center so you can identify songs playing in apps. To reveal a history of recognized songs, touch and hold the Shazam icon in the Control Center.
Those are the fourteen cool features we think every iPhone owner should take advantage of to improve their experience. You may already know some of these—and that’s perfectly fine with us. We’d love to hear about your list of secret iPhone features, so be sure to share them with other readers in the comments below.