The Phone You’re Probably Using at Half Its Capability
iOS adds features in every major version, and most users discover a fraction of them — the ones that were prominently featured in Apple’s keynote presentation or that a friend happened to mention. The features that improve daily use most significantly often aren’t the headline features; they’re the workflow improvements and hidden capabilities that require either reading the release notes or encountering them by accident.
What follows is a selection of iPhone features that are available to most current iPhone users (requiring iOS 16 or later for most), genuinely useful in daily use, and consistently unknown to users who haven’t specifically encountered them.
Back Tap: The Shortcut Hiding on the Back of Your Phone
Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap allows assigning actions to double-tap or triple-tap on the back glass of the iPhone. The available actions include: taking a screenshot, triggering an accessibility feature, running a Shortcut (Siri Shortcuts), controlling media playback, and scrolling. The back tap is hardware-independent — it uses the accelerometer to detect the tap pattern and works through cases.
The most useful Back Tap assignment for many users: double-tap to take a screenshot, eliminating the awkward simultaneous button press. Another popular assignment: triple-tap to toggle the flashlight. The Back Tap shortcut can also trigger any Siri Shortcut — which means any automation you’ve built in the Shortcuts app becomes available via a tap on the phone’s back.
Haptic Keyboard and Other Typing Improvements
Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Keyboard Feedback enables haptic feedback on the keyboard — a subtle vibration on each key press that many users find improves typing accuracy and feel. It’s disabled by default and remains largely undiscovered because it isn’t featured in any main settings category; it’s nested inside the keyboard section of a sounds menu.
The one-handed keyboard mode (available by touching and holding the globe icon on the keyboard) shifts the keyboard to either side of the screen, making one-handed typing significantly easier on larger iPhones. The swipe-to-type feature (enabled by default, slide your finger between letters without lifting) produces reasonably accurate word predictions using gesture input — faster than individual key taps for many users once the muscle memory develops.
Focus Modes and How to Actually Use Them
Focus modes (Settings > Focus, or the Control Center moon icon) allow configuring which apps can send notifications, which contacts can interrupt, and which home screen pages appear — all varying by focus mode. The default Sleep and Do Not Disturb modes most users know; the under-used capability is creating custom Focus modes for specific contexts: a Work focus that allows only work app notifications and shows the work-relevant home screen, a Personal focus that allows personal contacts and hides work apps, a Reading focus that silences everything.
The automation that makes Focus modes genuinely useful rather than a manual switch: Focus modes can be triggered automatically by time of day, location (home triggers Personal, office location triggers Work), or app use. A Focus mode that activates automatically when you arrive home, hiding work notifications until the next morning, is a meaningful quality-of-life improvement that runs without requiring any deliberate action.
Siri Shortcuts: Automation Without Any Code
The Shortcuts app (pre-installed, often overlooked) allows creating multi-step automation sequences triggered by a tap, a Siri command, a back tap, a Focus mode activation, or a schedule. The automation capabilities rival what many users would need a separate app for: automatically setting the volume when headphones connect, composing a message with today’s date, logging data to a spreadsheet when a specific event occurs, or requesting an Uber to home with a single tap.
The gallery within the Shortcuts app (tap Gallery) provides pre-built shortcuts for common use cases that can be added in one tap and used immediately. Starting with the gallery rather than building from scratch reveals what’s possible and provides a template for building custom shortcuts later. The Siri integration — ‘Hey Siri, commute home’ triggering a navigation + message + music sequence — is the feature that most users who discover it describe as genuinely useful in a way that surpasses their expectations.