Android's back gesture, formerly the back button, has long been a blessing and a curse. While it gives us system-wide backward navigation, the action can sometimes be unpredictable. But Google may have a solution with its new predictive back gesture, which gives you an animated peek at where you're about to go next to help you decide on continuing or staying with the current view.
Apple's Always-On display feature for the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max can show important information on the screen even when the device is sleeping. While the dimmed Lock Screen may seem like a WYSIWYG component, there are actually a few ways you can customize it to fit your needs better.
When you need to take notes, sketch out projects, brainstorm with others, create mood boards, or map out ideas without constraints, look no further than Freeform, Apple's new collaboration-friendly digital whiteboard.
It's that time of year again. No, not the holiday season … the "share your year in music listening" season. And no matter which music streaming service you use, there's a way to find and share (or not share) your activity from 2022.
Apple's Siri is well-versed in the spells of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but it's not like Android users are Muggles. Google Assistant, Android's virtual concierge, can cast a few spells out of the box, and it can learn the spells it doesn't know quicker than a year of studying at Hogwarts.
Apple's Dynamic Island is an animated, interactive isle surrounding the front-facing camera on the iPhone 14 Pro series. It's a small capsule when nothing is going on but fluidly stretches across the screen for notifications, alerts, and ongoing activities like music, timers, and directions. It can even expand with controls and more information. And now, you can get Dynamic Island on your Android phone.
One thing Apple Maps always lacked was the ability to add stops along a route while planning a trip. Navigation would help you travel from the beginning location to the final destination, and the only places you could add between that were pit stops like banks and ATMs, coffee shops, convenience stores, eateries, fast food, gas stations, and parking lots. That all changes in Apple Maps' latest update.
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 many different ways, some of which you probably haven't even considered.
Apple's bringing big changes to your iPhone's lock screen in iOS 16, and one of those changes lets you pick an always-updating wallpaper for your local weather conditions. If you don't want to wait until the fall for the stable iOS 16 version and don't want to install any iOS 16 betas, you can still get an always-updating weather wallpaper for your lock screen on iOS 15.
You can take a photo on your iPhone with just one tap or press, but you can also use the Camera app hands-free for more impressive images. Doing so lets you take more detailed selfies, include your whole group in the frame, or get steadier results in Night mode — and it's easy to accomplish. Spoiler alert: using "Hey Siri" is not enough.
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.
If you're like me, you don't have time to sit down and leisurely read an entire article from start to finish — but you still want to be informed throughout the day. Instead of just browsing the daily headlines, there's a free service that will summarize any article you throw at it, giving you a better idea of what's going on without committing to reading an entire article.
From time to time, you may need to locate the version and build number for a particular app on your iPhone or iPad, but it's not at all obvious where you can find the information. Well, there's more than one place to look on iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, but none are perfect solutions. Knowing each method will ensure you can always find any app's real version number.
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.
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.
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 force widgets, apps, and folders to have names — but a few workarounds can help you remove some of those icon labels for good.
Music goes well with almost every Instagram story, but adding a particular song or soundtrack isn't the most obvious task if you've never tried before or haven't done so in a long time.
Is your smartphone eavesdropping on you? It's a question that will never go away because it's easy to envision hackers or malicious apps taking over your device to spy on conversations, snap photos, or even record video. But fewer people will be asking it, thanks to Android 12, which has a new privacy feature that visually warns you of possible invasive surveillance.
In iOS 15, Apple unveiled a new feature called Focus, an extension of Do Not Disturb that lets you focus on the one thing that's important at any particular moment. It does so by minimizing distractions from your iPhone and other Apple devices, but there's a lot you should know about setting up and using Focus on your iPhone or iPad before you dig in.
The standard way to sort your notes and to-dos in Reminders has always relied on you putting them in the correct list and group. Then came smart lists for flagged and scheduled tasks, followed shortly by a smart list for tasks assigned to you. In iOS 15, Apple brings yet another way to find your reminders more easily — tags.
The new Material You theme engine with its fancy widgets is a sexy change for Android, but there's another new Android 12 feature that's more than just pretty colors and curves.
Safari saw many new features and improvements with Apple's latest iOS update, including webpage translations, privacy reports, and picture-in-picture. While the updates were well-received, Apple's mobile browser is still lacking some very basic features. Thankfully, there are shortcuts to bridge the gap.
Apple released the second beta for iOS 15 on Thursday, June 24. The update includes FaceTime's "SharePlay" feature for the first time, a new Maps icon, updates to Focus mode, in addition to many other changes and bug fixes.
Apple officially announced iOS 15 at WWDC Monday, June 7. With that announcement, we got our first look at brand new features like redesigned notifications, FaceTime screen and music sharing, and Focus modes in Do Not Disturb. All of these new iPhone features are available to test out today, thanks to the iOS 15 beta.
The last few weeks were fairly busy in the realm of augmented reality and remote meetings developments. Most of that activity was generated by some mammoth announcements from Snap and its Spectacles AR smartglasses, and Google, with its Project Starline experimental holographic video conferencing system.
The Shortcuts app can help you play the next unlistened podcast from one of the shows, but getting the latest unplayed episodes from your whole queue of shows in the Podcasts app is a little trickier. There is an easy way to do it on your iPhone, though, and you can even automate it so that Podcasts plays your most recent untouched episode automatically.
Your iPhone is full of features, many of which you might not even know about yet. Still, Apple keeps adding feature after feature with each new iOS update, and iOS 14.5 is no exception. The latest iOS version adds at least 69 features for your iPhone that you should be happy about.
If you rely on Apple Maps to get around over other navigation apps, there's a lot you can do. Look Around lets you tour cities up close, restaurant reservations make dining less frustrating, and 3D view gives a new perspective of a neighborhood. While there are many more where that came from, iOS 14.5 just added six new features and changes you need to know about.
Your voice is the key to unlocking many features on your iPhone. For example, you can ask Siri to send a text message to a friend, add items to a list, run a custom shortcut, or turn on your lights, but Apple does not allow you to unlock your iPhone with a Siri voice command. Instead, you can turn to a lesser-known feature to unlock your iPhone without Face ID, Touch ID, or typing your passcode.
While there's no denying that iPads are better when it comes to multitasking and productivity, your iPhone has a few tricks up its sleeve to rival even the best iPad features. One thing about iPadOS is that it's really easy to highlight editable text with gestures, but it's just as simple on iOS if you know all the secrets.
The battery on your iPhone can go from 10% to completely dead in a matter of minutes, or at least it can feel that way. Apple does prepare you with an alert when you hit the 20% and 10% mark, but it's easy to forget to charge your iPhone before it dies even with those notifications. That's why you should also be notified when your battery's down to 5% remaining.
Ah, subscriptions. Whether you love or hate them, they are now a fundamental part of our increasingly digital lives. If you have some essential subs on your iPad, iPhone, or Mac, like Apple Arcade, Apple Music, Apple News+, Bumble, Pandora, Tinder, or YouTube Premium, there are three key issues you need to know about that could unexpectedly stop your membership from renewing.
URL tracking codes: you'll see them on almost every link you copy online to share with friends and followers. It could be tens or hundreds of extra characters appended to the end of a URL, which websites and marketers use to tell how you got to the link in the first place. These excess tracking tokens not only make the links you share look sloppy and spammy — they could even invade your privacy.
I always keep my iPhone's Portrait Orientation Lock on so that my screen doesn't randomly rotate while I'm lying down. However, there are certain apps that I do turn it off for. It's kind of a pain since you have to swipe down the Control Center and toggle the orientation lock — but that ends now. Instead of doing it manually, a new iOS update can automate app orientations for you.
If you want to try out one of Apple's beta programs on your iPhone — whether that's by becoming a developer, joining the public beta, or using an IPSW of an available beta update — there's always a possibility that you'll want to go back to the stable iOS version you were using before. Likewise, if you updated to the latest stable release but liked how iOS worked on the previous version.
Apple released iOS 14.5 developer beta 1, and the update sports a list of interesting features and changes. Some of those include support for the Xbox Series X and PS5 DualSense controllers, the ability to unlock your iPhone with Apple Watch, AirPlay 2 support for Fitness+, 5G support for dual-SIM setups, and a refreshed Software Update page in Settings.
Every mainstream Android home screen app looks and behaves almost exactly like Google's Pixel Launcher. It's the trendsetter, like the Nexus Launcher before it. But when all your options are modeled after the same thing, that really takes the "custom" out of "custom launcher."
If you'd rather be gently relaxed out of bed instead of stressed out at loud alarm sounds, there are a few things you can do on your iPhone. One of your best options is to use carefully selected songs that start out calm and soothing and gradually increase in intensity and volume. But you could also use a more intense track you know will wake you up, only set to ascend in volume to ease you out of slumber.
ADB and Fastboot are powerful tools that have always required a computer. But with the right setup, you can now send commands to a phone using another phone.
You don't need to take screenshots or make screen recordings to save photos and videos from other users on Instagram. While Instagram doesn't offer an official way to download others' posted content, dozens of shortcuts are available for iPhone that can do just that. But which one should you pick?
