Things You Didn’t Know Your iPhone Could Do

As an iPhone user, we don’t know every feature of the phone because phones are constantly evolving with new updates and features.

If you are techy enough to know majority of the features of your iPhone, it helps you get the most value out of what you already own and boost your productivity.

Most people only use 30–40% of their phone’s capabilities, hence the reason why I have compiled this tips to make life a lot easier for iPhone users.

 1. White Noise Feature:

You can use your iPhone as a soothing background noise machine when you want to sleep, relax, or focus. The built-in feature provides calming ambient sounds without the need for any extra apps.

To activate it, open Settings > Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Background Sounds. Once there, choose from ths selection of ambient sounds  You will find Ocean sound , rain sound, stream and a couple of other peaceful sounds.

2. Flash for notifications

Another useful accessibility feature is to turn on your flash for notifications.

To do this, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio Visual > LED Flash for Alerts Ann turn it on.

If you turn on this feature, you’ll see a flash whenever you get a notification on you iPhone.

This equally means you can keep your iPhone in silent mode but still see when notifications arrive. 

3. Text replacements (i.e. “custom auto-complete”)

One of the best secret iPhone settings is called Text Replacement; you can think of it as your own personal autocomplete—or autocorrect-correction—feature. ^[1]

In Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement, you can set up bits of text that your iPhone replaces when you type them. For example, I like to set @@ to expand to my email address, and myad to expand to my home address. This can save you time when you’re filling in forms or answering emails.

You can include much larger text replacements, such as a boilerplate email or other texts that you may want to use often. Just copy the text from another document and paste it into the Phrase field.

If you find that the built-in autocorrect often makes errors in “correcting” things you type, you can also use Text Replacement to fix that as well. Just add the word that often causes you challenges into both the Phrase and Shortcut fields.

A related trick is that you can use this to “type” characters that aren’t on the built-in keyboard. For example, you can set up applelogo to “type” the Apple logo character (), again by using the copy-paste trick above. (Just be aware that the Apple logo is a rare exception that isn’t part of the Unicode standard, so it’s only visible on Apple devices. If you send that character to someone using Android, Windows, or other operating systems, they will just see a generic rectangle instead.)

You can also use it to quickly insert an emoji, rather than hunting for it on the emoji keyboard. For example, if you’re a Star Trek fan, you can set up llap to “type” Spock’s Vulcan salute (“live long and prosper”) hand gesture emoji: 🖖.