You Can Learn These 8 Life-Changing iPhone Tricks in One Minute or Less
Even if your eyes stay glued to your sleek new iPhone 24/7, chances are you haven't learned all the buried tricks that make being a human in the 21st century so much smoother.
These are eight shortcuts that, over time, will save you dozens of minutes of digging through contacts, switching through apps and waving your phone around searching for Wi-Fi. They'll even save you days, if endless frustration over dropped calls has caused you to throw your phone at the wall and schlep to the Genius Bar for repairs.
Ready for some rapid-fire lifehacks? Here goes.
1. Make calls super-quickly
Having to scroll through your contacts to find someone's name takes an agonizingly long time if you've got hundreds of numbers to sift through. Simply double-click your home button to see the app switcher and look at those thumbnails at the top for recent contacts. Click a name and you'll see various contact options one touch away.
2. Use Google Maps without an Internet connection
Ever had to use Google Maps in a foreign country where you have no cellphone service? Or had to reroute your travel plans while you're underground on the train? There's been a solution to this trouble all along.
Google Maps allows you to save your maps offline. All you have to do is go to the area you want to save, and search for "OK maps." It will then prompt you to save the area for offline searching at any time in the future.
3. Clear out your apps way faster
Up, up, up... left... up, up... left — this is how many of us clear out our apps when they're not in use, opening up the app switcher one by one and closing them down. Instead, you can use two hands to close them down in whole batches by using multiple fingers.
Then again, it's worth pointing out that closing your inactive apps won't actually save your battery life.
4. Answer texts without ever opening up your text messages
Usually, if you get an annoying text notification while you're already viewing something, you can click over and bang out a response. But for even faster reply, just swipe down, and you'll get a response window like this:
When you finish the message, send it and automatically return to what you were doing — no app switching necessary.
5. Fix that "ducking" autocorrect forever
No one ever means to say "ducking." Ever. So why not tell your phone to change every instance of "ducking" to "fucking" as soon as you type it?
Open up Settings, then go to General —> Keyboard —> Shortcuts. Click the "+" in the upper-right corner, then punch in this shortcut:
Remember: You don't need a machine to tell you how to live your life.
6. Delete that long text you don't really want to send
We all write things we don't mean — or at least that we don't mean to send. Then we hold backspace and watch as every word gets swept away, letting us type something more lucid.
Turn it into a moment of catharsis instead. If you've typed a text and haven't sent it, you can just shake your phone hard, and it'll prompt you to delete the text in its entirety.
7. Turn off your music after you've fallen asleep
Plenty of people love falling asleep to music. But letting that music play while you sleep is a waste of energy. Rather than letting Spotify play for eight hours as you lie unconscious, you can use Timer in the Clock app to turn it off after a set time.
Set a timer for an hour or two — or three, for you insomniacs — and tap the "When Timer Ends" button, which is usually used to pick the ringtone. Scroll to the bottom and you'll see an option for "Stop Playing," which will simply turn off whatever music is playing when the timer completes.
8. Figure out what apps are eating your battery life
Closing apps may not solve the problem of battery life, but you can at least see what's killing all of your battery. If you're bold enough to find out what apps you're really using the most, go into your Settings to General —> Usage —> Battery Usage for a screen that looks like this:
