How to make use of your iPhone’s Back Tap characteristic

Back Tap is among the best methods to place an iPhone operate you employ on a regular basis actually at your fingertips. It is precisely what it seems like: a option to entry completely different cellphone options by tapping the again of your cellphone — type of like an additional, user-customizable button. It was launched with iOS 14, and the characteristic works on gadgets as previous because the iPhone 8, which was launched 5 years in the past — so it’s extremely possible that you just’ve bought a suitable cellphone.

Here’s arrange Back Tap. For reference, I adopted these steps on an iPhone 13 Pro Max working iOS 15.4.1.

• Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap
• Choose Double Tap or Triple Tap to set a customized operate for these gestures

What you are able to do

For both double or triple faucet, you’ve quite a lot of choices — too many to listing right here. For starters, you’ll be able to assign any of your shortcuts to Back Tap, which opens up a bunch of potentialities. You can faucet the again of your cellphone to order your afternoon Flat White out of your neighborhood Starbucks, begin your each day Spanish lesson in Duolingo, or ship a textual content to somebody in your contacts. There are tons of issues you are able to do with shortcuts and, in flip, tons of issues you are able to do simply by tapping the again of your iPhone.

In addition to shortcuts, listed here are a few of the different methods you’ll be able to customise Back Tap:

• You can entry system features like launching the digital camera, turning in your flashlight, taking a screenshot, or muting your cellphone. These are all nice candidates for fast entry.
• There are accessibility choices, too. You can use Speak Screen to have Siri learn on-screen textual content, Magnifier to make use of your cellphone’s digital camera as a magnifying glass, or Background Sounds to play white noise.
• You also can scroll up or down by assigning these features to Back Tap.

Back Tap also can launch your Accessibility Shortcut. This is one other customizable characteristic within the accessibility menu that assigns one (or a number of) accessibility options to launch while you triple-click your cellphone’s aspect button. If you want, you can too assign these options to Back Tap — you’ll simply have to set it up individually. Here’s how to do this:

• Go to Settings > Accessibility
• Scroll all the way down to the General part and faucet Accessibility Shortcut
• Tap the choices you wish to assign to the shortcut

If you’ve a number of features assigned, a menu will pop up, prompting you to select one while you launch Accessibility Shortcut, both by triple-clicking the aspect button or utilizing Back Tap. You can change the order they seem in, too — when deciding on your accessibility features, lengthy press the three bars to the fitting of every choice to maneuver them greater or decrease within the listing.

Some of those choices will be assigned instantly with Back Tap, however there are extra features you received’t discover there, like the flexibility to extend display distinction and activate voice management.