6 iPhone Hacks That’ll Instantly Make Life Easier (2025 Edition)

0:05 Hey, think you know iPhone? Think again. These six tips will blow your mind. It might even save you some time. Especially number six. Hey, my name is Dan and this is my channel. I love making everyday tech easy. I spent 19 years at Apple and now I am in full-time ministry. I wanted to make this video today because I get this question all the time. Hey Dan, show me something new about iPhone. And to be honest, um after using iPhone since the inception, I keep finding new ways to use iPhone and and at the same time making myself a little bit more uh productive. So, I want to share with you six things on how I've hacked or not really hacked, but how I've used my iPhone to the next level.

0:50 Here is number one, backtap. Have you heard of backtap? This is a great feature. is actually found in system settings. So, I'm just going to back out here for a second. You see the gearbox right there to my on on the screen. It's a little gear box on your device. When you tap there, you scroll down to accessibility. Accessibility is a powerful area within iPhone within iOS to really cater to those who need um a little bit extra assistance. Now, there are things here for the hearing impaired, for the vision impaired, but there there's so many tools that you and I can use that makes the iPhone even that much special. So, go ahead and swipe down to where you see touch and it'll be right there. And now under touch, you'll see that there's a lot

1:37 here. There's assist of touch. You've probably already played around with this. Um, there's shake to undo, which is one of my favorite when you kind of just shake and undo your last move. But I want you to go all the way to the bottom to where it says back tap and go ahead and select back tap. And then there you'll notice that there is a double tap option and there's even a triple tap option and then there's a show banner. So let's start off with the double tap option. Now I'm going to keep this simple and I'm going to let you be creative on how you want to use this. But in essence, we are going to turn the back of your iPhone into a sensor where you're going to be able to double tap or triple tap. That's right. There there's no I mean it is using the motion sensor, the gyroscopes within the iPhone to feel you tapping. How cool is that? Let me

2:23 show it to you in action. So, I'm going to select a really easy one here. I'm going to select flashlight. I know it doesn't make sense because I have I have an action button here, but just for for demo purposes. So, now that I've selected flashlight as my double tap, all I'm going to do is I'm going to double tap on my device pretty slow. And my flashlight turned on. How stinking cool is that? You can double tap again. I mean, you can mess with your kids, you can mess with your wife, you can mess I mean, you can you can you can win some money here, people. Now, if you go back one, you can actually add a triple tap. And I actually have the triple tap for control center. I I kind of change this up a lot. Um, but what'll happen is when I triple tap, one, two, three, you'll notice that my control

3:10 center uh screen comes down. Now that is and there's my flashlight. Double tap and then triple tap. One, two, three. And you'll notice control center. Why is this helpful? Well, you can get creative as much as you want, but sometimes you just have one you have you're you're rocking the phone with one hand, you're doing something else with the other hand, and you need to get to control center. How are you going to do the Olympic, you know, you're going to stretch and swipe? Okay. Well, how easy is it? Is it to just triple tap? One, two, three, and there comes the control center. Pretty pretty cool feature number one, backtap. Did you know that one? Now, the next one that I want to talk to you about is live text. Now, this is a cool one, and I don't know why

3:56 people don't use this even more. Now, this is used, you can use this across the board. You can use this in any application, whether you're in messages, whether you're in email, whether you're in uh notes, etc. But I'm going to open up notes here. And I just grabbed the first thing that I found, which was my warranty uh card for my meta ray bands. By the way, did you check that video up? I'll leave a link up above. And I'm just going to open up to the very first page or second page where you can see a bunch of text down here, right? And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and and open up my my messages as you can see there. Now, I'm gonna tap and hold where it says text message. And you're going to get this window that pops up that says

4:42 writing tools or autofill. Well, there's nothing to autofill, right? Well, think again. I'm going to tap on autofill. And notice that now I can autofill my contact, a password, or scan text. Now, watch this. I'm not going to take a picture. I'm just literally going to tap on scan text. You'll notice that the camera opens up down below. I'm going to point it at this [Music] manual and it's going to start to detect what input I want and instantaneously it's adding it there to my text message. I'm going to tap on insert and just like that it is on there. How amazing is that? Now, be honest. Did you know that?

5:27 Drop me a comment down below if you did or if you didn't. If you if you didn't and you already learned two things, do me a favor. Hit the thumbs up and subscribe. We are we are over 900 followers. That is amazing. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You guys are the crazy ones. Um but thank you so much for for following on. So live text is my second feature and how I use my iPhone. Now, for this third option, this one is another um another one that I think it's not used enough and it's surprise it surprises me all the time that people still don't know this one. And my third tip of the of this video is actually drag and drop. Now, hear me out. Drag and drop has been on iPhone

6:14 for quite a bit, but people still don't know. I'm going to show you just a couple of different ways on how you can drag and drop. And again, I'm going to tap and hold on I'm just going to pick system settings or better. Yeah, I'll just tap on system settings and and I'll get my my device into into into jiggle mode, right? Where all my apps. So many times I see my friends, even family members, that they'll grab one app and they'll swipe it and they're, you know, they're relocating it. They're dragged. Then they go to the second one. When all you have to do is I'm going to try to do this on camera just so you can kind of see it there. But I'm going to drag and I'm just going to with my second finger. I'm just going to tap on this other app. I can tap on all of these again while holding it down on my finger. And now I

7:01 can drag and drop wherever I where wherever I please. If I wanted to reorganize this um this home screen, if I wanted to swipe off uh and and and drag all these icons, I can drag and drop. As a matter of fact, if I go to Safari right now, I know it's easy to share a website, right? If you're at apple.com or you're website, you can tap on that share icon at the bottom, which is that square with the arrow pointing up, and you can text message somebody. But maybe you're wanting to uh grab this this link or this website and drop it on a note or drop it on a text thread or who what whatever. I can just simply um tap and hold on on the website and I can just

7:47 drag it around. You guys can see it there as my phone is on screen, but you can also see me here. Now, without letting go and just using my thumb or my other hand, I'm going to swipe up into the app mode. I'm going to go back to that text message and I can just drop it right there in that message. Uh, and I'm adding a link. How How cool is that? You can drag and drop drag and drop icons. You can drag and drop information. And again, never leaving your finger up off the screen. Once you're selected, you can tap with your second finger and you can swipe up and you can swipe across. I know I'm using my hand. I know it's not super awesome to see, but I think you get the idea. again. Pretty pretty awesome. I I hope you're learning because I I'm learning. Drag and drop is

8:33 my third option there. Now, here's another cool one, which is screen record. Now, this one may not be totally applicable to everybody, but I think you may find a good use for it. Now, you know how to get the screen record. You're going to swipe down on your control panel or you're going to triple tap if you set that up. And you'll notice that there is an icon here. in my case is right there under TV lights. It's kind of dead center. I kind of tap and hold on it and it's my my screen record. Now, screen record is pretty cool because you can record your screen. You can um you can send a message. Maybe you're doing text support for your mom or for your dad or for your spouse or for your kids or or somebody. You want to capture what's going on. Well, many

9:20 people just have always told me, "Hey, you know, I wish that it would record audio." And I tell them, "It does. You just have to turn it on." We're just kind of quick to just tap screen record and go. But look what happens if you tap and hold again. Screen record, which is um it's going to be kind of right here in the second in my middle line, the little round icon. I'm going to tap it and hold. And you're going to see it says, "Hey, what do you want to screen record? you want to screen record from photos or chat GPT or Discord, all this other stuff. But notice at the bottom it says microphone off. If I go ahead and turn on microphone on and now I start screen recording, it'll count me down. 3 2 1, I can say, "Hey, Mom. This is how easy it is to drag and drop. I'm going

10:06 to open up Safari." And all you have to do is tap and hold where it says the website and just kind of move that around. And you can drag this wherever you want, Mom. And you can drop it. You can swipe up and drop it down in your next application. And there you go, mom. So, hope this helps. Give me a call if you need additional help. Now, I'm recording that. So, I'm going to tap up here where the little red icon is. I'm going to hit stop recording. And now, that live screen recording will be directly in my photo album with audio. Let's see if you can hear it. Open up Safari. And all you have to do is tap and hold where it says the website and just kind of move that around. And you can drag this wherever

10:51 you want. Mom, you can drop it. Mom's not going to get Mom's going to call me back. What do you mean drag and drop? What do you mean? I'm Anyways, but you can screen record while you can you can record audio while you screen record. I think that's so cool. Again, may be applicable to you. I hope. All right. The next one that I have for us is one called audio control. Now, this is a feature that you probably won't even see if you're not looking for it. And what this does, especially if you are, if you do a lot of phone calls, you do a lot of conference calls, maybe you're, you know, a sales leader or whatnot, and you don't have AirPods. If you have AirPods, they do a great job noise cancelling as they are. And what I mean by that, it it eliminates the outside noise for those that are hearing you speak. But let's

11:38 say you have a regular pair of of headphones or you don't like headphones. You're just using the iPhone to your face or maybe even on speaker. While you're actively on a phone call, you're going to see these controls on the control center. Now, I'm not going to make a call here while we're recording, but I am just going to open up my chat GPT as if I'm was going to speak to it because anything that uses the microphone um outside of outside of the Apple apps, like the voice memo recorder or the actual camera, like if you're recording video, Apple does not give you access to this because I guess they want you to tweak the audio within the app and not through control center. So, it kind of makes sense, but I just for demo purposes, this is how I'm going to do it. So, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go ahead and launch chat GPT and I'm going to go ahead and start a

12:23 voice uh conversation, if you will. If you notice all the way in the very top of my iPhone display, I have that little orange light, meaning that something is listening to me. So, I'm going to tap up here where it says chat GPT controls. You would not see that normally. This would be now on a voice call. You'll see phone or audio audio control. and you get this window up that says automatic standard voice isolation or wide spectrum. If you're on an important phone call, you're in a loud environment, you're at the airport, you're in a inside of a conference room with a bunch of people, you're walking through a terminal, you you want to select voice isolation. And what that'll do is it'll pick up only your voice on the iPhone itself, and it's going to do a great job muting the noise around us.

13:10 Now, if you are in a room and you want to get the environment, right? People are singing happy birthday or people are wanting to send a message to the person that you're on the phone with, then for that you could select wide spectrum. Wide spectrum, it's going to pick up everything around you. Typically, I leave it in automatic, but just so that you know that you have full control over this. How cool is that? Now, this next one is a doozy, and honestly, this is probably one of my favorite ones, and it's called Tabbed Groups. Now, if you're like me, I'm going to go ahead and and and and kind of uh uh confess here a little bit. Um I'm going to open up Safari on my my device, and you're going to notice that all the way

13:56 at the very bottom, I have the left arrow, I have the share icon, I have my bookmarks, and I have these two squares that are overlapping. Those are all my tabs. I have 458 tabs opened, you know, at any given time. I know, I know you can you can drop down a comment. As a matter of fact, how many tab go right now, how many tabs do you have open in your Safari right now? Go. I'll wait. You see, I I'm not the only one. Now, so this is a game changer for me. If you are a pro user, you you are already making you're making your bookmarks, you're making folders, you might be that organized, but maybe you are doing research on a specific thing. Maybe you're doing a home remodel or

14:42 maybe you're shopping for a prom dress now that we're in graduation season or you're looking for photo ideas for for your son's graduation. or whatever the case may be, you're getting ready for summer vacation and you are constantly online and you're finding these websites. So right here I have some of my websites. I have Apple's website, Mac Rumors, 9to5, Apple Insider, so on and so forth. If I wanted to group all these websites and create a tabbed folder for them, before I would have to select each website, select share, add a bookmark, go tap, add a folder. And I mean, it was a bunch of steps. And again, here I am on my iPhone. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag and drop by tapping and holding on one of the icons, one of these websites. And then with my other

15:30 finger, typically my thumb, just because it's kind of in close proximity here, I'm going to tap on some of these websites, all these that are about Mac stuff, right? So now I have all these Mac website Safari links here. And if you notice at the bottom, it says 458 tabs. If I swipe over, it'll say Mac News. If I swipe over, it'll say YouTube. And I even have a plus arrow at the bottom. Well, I already have one called Mac News and I can go ahead and just drop them here. But just for demo purposes, I'm going to add plus page. And I can add these wherever I want. Or I can go back and I can just drop them here. And just like that, I just created a folder that's called Mac News with all

16:17 these tabs. Now, if I do want to create a new one, for all intents and purposes, down in the middle of the page, you're going to see those three little dots with those three little lines right under where it says Mac News. I'm going to tap there. And you'll notice that I can add these to my Mac News, my YouTube, a private folder, a new empty tab group, or I can even select a different profile. Maybe this is your work profile, your home profile, maybe your wife's profile, your kids, whatever the case may be. I'm going to add a new empty tab group. And then here I can I can name this like Mac uh rumors. Right. So now I have this brand new tab. I can go back and select all

17:03 these other windows where I have again just tap and hold. And then I'll just with my second finger without taking any of my fingers off the page I have I now have them selected. I'm just going to swipe over to where it says Mac Rumors and then just let go and I have them there. So now I have a grouped tab uh folder. How amazing. Hey, listen. I hope that you've gotten some serious value out of today's uh video. Six powerful ways on how you can be more productive with your iPhone, how you can save more time. And if you're like me, this maybe would have just blown your mind. If you learn something, then do me a favor. Let me know down below. And what you learned and how you use it. If you have an awesome tip that you want me to

17:49 showcase, drop it there so that the rest of the community can do it. But do me one humongous favor. Go ahead and hit that subscribe icon. So many of you are watching the videos, are not subscribed, and I have a short-term goal to hit a thousand subscribers just for for a mental achievement so I can check that box off. But thank you so much for watching. Until next time. Peace.