12 iPhone tips and tricks worth knowing in 2026

Your iPhone does far more than most people ever discover — Apple has a habit of burying its best features one settings menu too deep. Here are a dozen genuinely useful ones worth the minute it takes to set them up. Most work on any iPhone running a recent version of iOS (roughly iOS 26 or later), so you don’t need the newest model.

Camera & photos

Use the volume buttons as a shutter. In the Camera app, press either volume button to snap a photo — a real, physical shutter that’s far easier for one-handed shots and selfies than reaching for the on-screen button.

Lift a subject straight out of a photo. Open any photo, press and hold on the person, pet, or object, and iOS pops it free of the background. From there you can copy it, share it, or drag it into Messages — no editing app required.

Scan documents without an app. Open Notes, start a note, tap the camera icon, and choose Scan Documents. Your iPhone finds the edges, corrects the angle, and hands you a clean PDF. It’s a full document scanner you already own.

Strip location data before you share. Photos quietly store where they were taken. When you share one, tap Options at the top of the share sheet and toggle Location off — worth doing before anything goes public.

Typing & text

Glide to type. Instead of tapping each key, drag your finger across the letters in one continuous motion. It’s often faster than pecking, and it’s been built into the keyboard for years — most people just never try it.

Copy text out of any photo (Live Text). Point your camera at a receipt, sign, or business card — or open a photo — then touch and hold the text. You can select, copy, translate, or dial a number straight from the image.

Everyday speed

Tap the back of your phone to do things (Back Tap). In Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap, assign a double- or triple-tap on the back of your iPhone to almost anything: a screenshot, the flashlight, Control Center, a shortcut. It becomes muscle memory fast.

Capture a whole scrolling page. Take a screenshot, tap the preview, then choose the Full Page tab. iOS stitches the entire page into one PDF — perfect for long articles, receipts, or chat threads.

Name that song, instantly. Add Music Recognition to Control Center (Settings → Control Center). One tap identifies whatever’s playing — it even works with audio coming through your own headphones.

Turn your charger into a bedside clock (StandBy). Set your iPhone on its side while it’s charging and locked, and it switches to a glanceable display of the time, your widgets, or photos.

Privacy

Hand out disposable email addresses (Hide My Email). With iCloud+, you can generate a random address that forwards to your real inbox — perfect for signups you don’t fully trust. If one starts attracting spam, delete it and your real address stays clean.

Safari

Master the hidden Safari gestures. Swipe left or right on the address bar to flip between open tabs, and swipe on the page itself to go back and forward. In the tab switcher, swipe a tab left to close it. Tiny gestures, big time savings.

What’s coming: iOS 27 and the new Apple Intelligence

At WWDC in June 2026, Apple previewed iOS 27 with its biggest AI push yet: a rebuilt Siri with genuine on-screen awareness, system-wide Visual Intelligence, smarter Photos editing, and an “agentic” Passwords app — with some cloud features now powered by Google’s Gemini models. It runs on iPhone 15 Pro and later (and the full iPhone 16 line onward). Worth knowing: a few of the heavier features, like image generation, carry daily limits tied to your iCloud+ plan.

The bottom line

None of these need the newest hardware or a single download — just a minute in Settings. Try two or three today; the volume-button shutter and Back Tap alone tend to stick.

This is the first post in our new Apple section — more tips, honest reviews, and buying guides to come.