iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

Temporarily Use Old Passcode on iPhone (iOS 17)

If you've recently changed the iPhone passcode, you can set your iPhone to temporarily use the old passcode when you forget the new passcode on iPhone. This is a great way to ensure you don't get locked out of your phone before you've gotten in the habit of remembering the new passcode. In order for this option to show up, you will need to have recently changed the passcode, and you will need to have updated to iOS 17. 

Over the decades, I've heard some call iOS gaming escapism, while others may call it a distraction from the headline news on any given day; but as a lifetime core gamer, I've found myself extremely grateful on more than one occasion for the comfort, the exhilaration, the competition ,and the break from the day-to-day, real-world ups and downs that some of the more deeply immersive iOS game can provide. Mobile gaming has come a long way over the years and we now have plenty to choose from when it comes to core iOS games. On that note,  it's my pleasure to present iPhone Life's picks for best core iOS games.

iPhones with 3D Touch have Quick Actions that allow you to activate 3D Touch by hard-pressing an app and revealing places within that app you can quickly jump into. For example, when you 3D Touch the Settings app, you see multiple options, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Battery. By tapping on of the options, you’ll jump into that place within the app. You can do a similar thing with the Phone app on iPhone. Except when you 3D Touch the Phone app, your options include Create a New Contact. Here’s how to create a new contact from the Home screen with 3D Touch.

Part of iOS 10 on the iPhone is having a widget screen that’s to the left of your Lock Screen. The widgets screen allows you to see snapshots of certain apps and information. But you can use the search bar at the top to do a phone-wide search for Mail, Notes, websites, apps, wikipedia pages, movies, Twitter, and more. Don’t worry about privacy—you’ll have to unlock your phone before accessing the information. But if you know what you’re looking for, this feature can save you some time getting there. Here’s how to search your iPhone from the Lock Screen.

Did you know Apple makes its Music radio stations completely free? You don’t even need an Apple Music membership in order to take advantage of them. If you want to create your own radio station from a song you like, you will need an Apple Music membership in order to do that. But you can listen to free radio stations in Apple Music with or without paying for a subscription. The free radio stations include Beats 1, Bloomberg Radio, ESPN News and Sports, and NPR News and Culture, to name a few. Here’s how to listen to free radio stations in Apple Music without a subscription.

Apple Maps Favorites allow you to skip typing in your home address every time you want to navigate there. Instead, you can save your often-used locations, including work, home, and any place else you want, by opening Maps, searching for your favorite location's address, tapping on it in the search results list, and then scrolling all the way to the bottom to tap Add to Favorites. Your list of favorites will appear every time you open Maps, and navigating to one of them is just one tap away. Read on to learn more about how to add Favorites to your Apple Maps and how your Favorites can help you plan your frequent trips.

On early models of the iPhone, you could force restart your iPhone by holding the Home button and the Sleep/Wake button at the same time. However, Apple has changed the hard restart method since the iPhone 7. The iPhone 6s, 6s Plus, and iPhone SE use a different hard restart method from the iPhone 7 or 7 Plus, which also varies from the force restart sequence for the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and iPhone SE (2nd generation). This article will show you how to restart all iPhone models that have a Home button. If your iPhone doesn't have a Home button, read our article on how to hard restart an iPhone X or later.

Sometimes, while browsing the internet, you'll come across words you don't understand or subjects you want to learn more about. The Look Up menu provides links to several options; Apple's dictionary, Siri suggested websites, Wikipedia, the App Store, Twitter, and more. You can even use Look Up as a free thesaurus app for Safari, or use the Look Up feature in Safari to find additional references to a word or phrase on the internet. Here’s how to use the Look Up feature in Safari.

With iOS 10 and MacOS Sierra, Apple has added multiple new tools for easily working across your devices. iCloud Drive, which was introduced with iOS 9, allows you to access files from your Mac on your iPhone. This process of transferring your Mac documents to your iPhone has become easy with iOS 10 and MacOS Sierra, because now you can simply drag an image or document to your Mac desktop and find it in your iCloud Drive app on your iPhone. You can even create folders in the iPhone Files app, so you can find the documents more easily. We’ll go through the whole process; here’s how to get files from your Mac into the iCloud Drive App on your iPhone.

Facebook has this nifty little feature called “On This Day” or “Year In Review” that shows you posts from the past and encourages you to share and comment on them, which is great if they’re memories you want to see. However, Facebook selects which pictures to show you based on past interaction, which doesn’t always mean you end up seeing the happiest of memories. There isn’t a blanket way to turn off the feature, but you can designate people and dates you don’t want to be reminded of. You can easily choose to stop setting Facebook memories from within the mobile app. Here’s how to turn off Facebook “On This Day” Memories on iPhone.

The Apple Mail app on the iPhone allows you to filter your email with a single tap. When you tap the filter icon in the Mail app, you can easily turn the email filter on or off. You can then use this email filter to view only your unread emails, but you can also customize the iPhone's email filter so you only see flagged emails, emails sent that day, or emails with attachments. Here’s how to filter emails in the Mail app on your iPhone to see only unread emails.

Pages