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iOS 18 Tips, Tricks, How-Tos, News

How To: The Fastest Way to Scroll Through Your iPhone's Home Screen Pages & Folders

If you have a lot of apps, you likely have a lot of home screen pages unless you hid them. With many pages, swiping over to a particular one can feel very tedious, especially if you're doing so repetitively, over and over again. If this sounds like your iPhone experience, you should know you're swiping wrong. There's a much faster way to get around your home screen, thanks to iOS 14.

How To: Add Passes, Tickets, Rewards, Coupons, Gift Cards, IDs & More to Apple Wallet for iPhone

The Wallet app on your iPhone can be used to store and access event tickets, loyalty cards, boarding passes, gym memberships, airline miles, gift cards, coupons, and more — all in one centralized place. Before doing so, though, you must add your passes to Wallet, and there is more than one way to do it. However, not every pass can be added using all of the available methods.

How To: iOS 14's Revamped Home Screen Search Can Help You Open Hidden Apps Faster

The ability to hide entire pages on your iPhone's home screen is an excellent privacy upgrade packed into iOS 14. That said, it can be a bit of a pain to find and open the hidden apps on those pages in a timely fashion. Luckily, iOS 14 has a solution that makes opening those apps, as well as any others, faster and more convenient — and we're not talking about the new App Library.

How To: Hide the Picture-in-Picture Window on Your iPhone to Listen to Audio Only or Take a Video Break

Previously limited to apps like Facebook and YouTube as an in-app feature only, picture-in-picture mode is now an OS-level feature in iOS 14. That means any app can quickly flip the switch to let you watch videos in an overlay window while you multitask in other apps. However, sometimes you only need to hear the audio and not see the video, and that's totally possible too.

How To: Combine iOS 14 Home Screen Widgets into a Swipeable Stack to Save Space

Home screen widgets might not be a new concept in the Android world, but for iPhones, they're downright revolutionary. A new iOS 14 feature allows you to place small, medium, and large-sized widgets of your favorite apps on the home screen, to see important information without needing to long-press an app's icon, swipe to the Today View, or launch an app directly. Even better — you can stack them!

How To: Hide Any App on Your iPhone in Plain Sight

If there's an iOS app you want to hide from your iPhone's home screen, there are a few built-in ways to do so in iOS 14, but there is a clever workaround you can use in older iOS versions. Plus, it also works in iOS 14 as a way to disguise app icons instead of just hiding them, so no app is what it seems.

How To: Add Captions to Photos & Videos in iOS 14 to Make Searching by Metadata Easier

If you've been an iPhone user for quite some time, you probably have quite a bit of photos and videos in iCloud or on your device. Unless you know the date, location, or event, it can be pretty hard to find a specific memory. Even with intelligent search suggestions, AI-created categories, and multi-keyword filters, you still may not be able to find what you want. The new iOS 14 update changes that.

How To: Set an Alarm on Your iPhone for When Your Battery Reaches Full Charge

Out of all the myths about the iPhone's battery, one that's very true is that charging your phone overnight is bad news. Keeping the charge level at 100% puts the battery under strain, which can permanently damage it. Apple took steps to address the issue in iOS 13, where your battery stops charging when it hits 80% in some scenarios, but that's not always enough.

How To: Auto-Hide New Apps You Install in iOS 14 for a Cleaner Home Screen

If you keep your iPhone's home screen obsessively tidy, new apps are the bane of your existence. Hyperbole aside, they automatically fill the first available space on your home screen, starting on the second page, which can wreak havoc on your carefully planned layouts. With iOS 14, however, you can auto-hide new apps so that you never see them until you want to.

How To: Add PayPal to Google Pay as a Payment Method to Use in Gmail, YouTube & Other Google Services

On Android, you can connect your PayPal account to Google Pay so that you can use that as a payment option when checking out with Google's digital wallet platform. It even works across Google services like the Play Store, Gmail, YouTube, and the Google Store. If you have an iPhone, you can also use PayPal via Google Pay, but what you can do is limited.

How To: Share Apple Music Songs to Spotify Users (& Vice Versa) on Your iPhone

To share a song or album to family and friends, it's as easy as copying its link in the app and pasting that into a message. However, not everyone uses the same music streaming service, so a link to an Apple Music song won't do a Spotify, Tidal, Pandora, Deezer, or YouTube Music subscriber any good. If you're on an iPhone, though, there's an easy way to convert links from one service to another.

How To: Use These Tricks to Set Timers Faster on Your iPhone

The native timer feature on your iPhone works well enough that you probably haven't even thought about installing a third-party timer. With just a few taps, you can get a countdown for any amount of time up to 24 hours (or one second shy of 24 hours, to be precise). But as fast as it can be to set a timer from the Clock app, there are even faster ways to start the countdown.

How To: Add Custom Shortcuts to Your iPhone's Share Sheet & Reorganize Them for Quicker Access

With Shortcuts, Apple has designed a way to create your own tools and automations right on your iPhone. And to top it off, your creations can be accessed in a variety of ways, including Siri phrases, widgets, and the Shortcuts app itself. Perhaps even more useful is adding them as custom actions to your Share Sheet and making them available to you system-wide.

How To: The Simple Way to Enable Caps Lock on Your iPhone

When you need to type in all caps on a computer, you just press the "caps lock" key. But no such key seems to exist on iOS. The "shift" key appears to work at first but will deactivate once you type one capital letter. Holding down the shift key while you type gets the job done, but it's a pain. While it might not be obvious, enabling caps lock is actually really simple.

How To: Your iPhone's Using More Data Than It Needs, but This Could Stop It

While mobile data caps are larger than they used to be, many of us still have limits to contend with. If you find yourself up against that ceiling month after month, your iPhone itself might be to blame. Luckily, there's an easy fix to stop your iOS device from burning through data in the background.

How To: Add Dropbox, Google Drive & Other Cloud Storage Apps to Files on Your iPhone (& Manage All Your Docs from One Place)

The built-in Files app on your iPhone has only gotten better since it was introduced in iOS 11, with small improvements after each new iOS version. You can manage files on your internal storage as well as in iCloud Drive, but one of the best features is being able to manage media and documents from all of your cloud storage accounts in one place.

How To: There's a Quick Gesture to Open Hidden Camera Settings on Your iPhone

The camera on models in the iPhone 11 series includes an ultra-wide lens to take wider images, Night mode for taking better-looking photos in low-light environments, and a 16:9 frame for shooting. With these new features comes a slightly redesigned interface in the Camera app, one that even the second-generation iPhone SE received despite only having one of those three features.