Tweaks & Hacks
How To: Hide All App, Folder, and Widget Names on Your iPhone or iPad's Home Screen
In recent years, Apple has made it much easier to customize the Home Screen on your iPhone or iPad, and some of the newer tools are perfect for neat freaks. Nonetheless, a tidy Home Screen can still feel cluttered when iOS and iPadOS forces widgets, apps, and folders to have names. There are a few workarounds though that can help you remove some of those icon labels for good.
How To: 12 Hidden iMessage Features for iPhone You Probably Didn't Know About
There are many things Apple doesn't tell you about its products, and that's definitely the case when it comes to its Messages app. Hidden features lurk in your SMS and iMessage conversations just waiting to be found, and we've unearthed some of the most secret ones.
How To: Always-Updated List of Apps That Let You Change Their Home Screen Icons on Your iPhone
Apple's Shortcuts app lets you make and use custom icons for any app on your iPhone or iPad, but it won't actually replace any icons. If your goal is to change the official icon for the app itself without any redirects, it's possible, but only for some third-party apps found in the App Store.
How To: Use Invisible Zero-Width Characters to Hide Secret Messages in Plain Sight
With a simple web-based tool, you can hide secret messages for family, friends, and fellow spies inside of plain text communications, and anyone that intercepts the messages will be none the wiser.
How To: Reset Safari's Experimental Features to the Defaults to Fix or Troubleshoot Browsing Issues
Safari's advanced experimental features give you access to new browser initiatives, upcoming web tools, element changes, behavior adjustments, and other preliminary feature tests in development by Apple. If you use them on your iPhone, you can either improve your Safari experience or wreck it. Resetting the flags provides a fresh start, but it's always been a massive headache — until now.
How To: Hide Apps on Your Samsung Galaxy's Home Screen, App Tray, and Search
You don't have to see every app installed on your phone if you don't want to. Samsung One UI makes it easy to hide apps from your Samsung Galaxy's home screen, app tray, and search tool, whether you want to declutter, simplify things, or keep other people from seeing some of the apps you use.
How To: Get the iPhone SE 3 and Green iPhone 13 Wallpapers for Your Phone's Background
At its March 8 event, Apple showed off the new green iPhone 13 and alpine green 13 Pro models, as well as the third-generation iPhone SE with 5G. Each comes with new wallpapers, and you can get all of them on your phone right now.
How To: 14 Harry Potter Spells for Siri That Turn Your iPhone into a Magical Elder Wand
Your days as an ordinary Muggle are over, as long as you have an iPhone. With just a word or two, you can use your iPhone and newfound Muggle-born powers to cast spells just like Harry Potter and team. Only your "wand" is from Apple, not Ollivanders in Diagon Alley.
How To: Scroll Through TikTok Hands-Free on Your iPhone or iPad Using Simple Voice Commands
If you can't curb your TikTok obsession, at least make it more efficient by taking your hands out of the equation. So when you're eating breakfast, working on your computer, or using your hands for another non-TikTok task, you don't even have to touch your iPhone or iPad to scroll through all of those videos in your feed. Instead, you can just tell it what to do, and it'll listen.
How To: Make Your iPhone Speak Its Battery Level Every Time You Start or Stop Charging
While there are many ways to see the exact battery life left on your iPhone, you can take all the work out of it by making your iPhone verbally tell you the current percentage every time you start or stop charging it. Best of all, this trick works whether you use wired or wireless chargers.
How To: Keep Your Night Vision Sharp with the iPhone's Hidden Red Screen
Night Shift, Dark Mode, Reduce White Point, and Zoom's Low Light Filter all help reduce the harmful effects on your body's clock that bright iPhone and iPad screens have at night. But there's another option on iOS and iPadOS that turns your entire display red, and it's useful for so much more than just late-night browsing in bed.
How To: 11 Hidden iOS Features You Won't Find in Any Apple Docs
There are many things your iPhone or iPad can do, and Apple does an excellent job of documenting everything on its website. But there are some features that won't show up in any Apple manuals or help pages.
How To: The Trick That Lets You Link to Specific Start Times in YouTube Videos Right from Your Phone
You can add a timestamp to any YouTube video in just a few clicks from the desktop website on your computer but not from YouTube's iOS or Android app. Until YouTube adds a "start time" when sharing videos from the mobile app, you'll have to use one of these workarounds on your phone or tablet.
How To: Download Instagram Reels on Your iPhone for Offline Use, Better Playback Control, and More
Downloading content from TikTok is relatively easy, even if the video is protected, but the same can't be said of Reels, Instagram's version of short-form videos. Instagram doesn't make it easy to download content unless it's your own, and that's especially true with Reels. However, there is a way to bypass Instagram's restrictions on your iPhone and save videos locally without ever leaving the app.
How To: Make Your iPhone Delete Old Screenshots Automatically So Your Photos App Doesn't Become a Hot Mess
If you're like me, you take more than just a few screenshots throughout the day, and they add up fast on your iPhone. When you snap that many images of the screen, your Photos app's "Screenshots" folder can swell beyond triple digits if you don't manage it, and your "Recents" folder will become a cluttered mess. But there is a trick to keeping screenshots in check, and you can have total control over it.
How To: Force Per-App Dark Mode Settings by Bypassing Your iPhone's System-Wide Theme
Some apps look great with Dark Mode, and some do not. So when you have system-wide Dark Mode enabled on your iPhone and are using an app that only looks good in Light Mode, you'd normally have to turn the dark appearance off manually, then switch it back on when you leave. But there's a workaround that can automate the process for you.
How To: The Ultimate Guide to Using Safari Extensions on Your iPhone for High-Octane Web Browsing
You've probably already used a few Safari Extensions on your Mac, but if you haven't explored Safari's web extensions on your iPhone yet, you're missing out on some fantastic possibilities to increase productivity, make tasks easier, filter out noise, and bring more fun to your browsing experience.
How To: Add Unsupported Cards and Passes to Apple Wallet for Quick, Easy Access on Your iPhone
Apple's Wallet app lets you store boarding passes, concert tickets, gym memberships, vaccination cards, movie stubs, rewards cards, insurance info, student IDs, and more in one place on your iPhone, and you just double-click the Home or Side button to access them. Unfortunately, a decent amount of cards and passes are not officially supported — but that doesn't mean you can't add them.
How To: 16 Ways to Customize Your iPhone's Weather App (Yes, There Are Really 16 Things You Can Tweak)
Apple's Weather app has been around forever, at least, for iPhone, and it's gone through many design changes over the years. But we're at a point now where we can actually customize how the Weather app looks and feels in a number of different ways, some of which you probably haven't even considered.
How To: These Hacks Make Your iPhone Apps Play Different Background Sounds When You Open Them
You can play background sounds in iOS 15 to help you focus, stay calm, or fall asleep, essentially turning your iPhone into a personal sound machine wherever you go. Even better, there's a way to set each of your apps to play one of Apple's six ambient soundscapes automatically. When you open the app, its assigned sound plays, then it stops when you exit or switch to another app.
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