An Apple iPhone is synonymous with simplicity, and it’s no wonder why. Portrait photos, instant messaging, finding devices, and monitoring spending, are all done in just a few taps. Apple releases cutting edge phones every year with new features. However, there are even more ways to explore the ease of iPhone usage when hold or “long-press” is used instead of a tap.
In any time-crunch or plain moment of laziness, there are great features iPhone offers to its user, which can make anyone the wiser, so here are the 10 Hidden iPhone “Long Press” Features You Didn’t Know About.
“Group Chat Contacts” iMessage
This long press is on the contact icon of a group chat in iMessage. Being added to a group chat that is not already filled with established and dedicated contact names, sometimes with emojis, is painful enough, so this is a nifty shortcut to avoid passing through a message thread to view contacts.
Long pressing gives you the total count of contacts included, their numbers, and displays the messengers in chronological order from most recent activity and on.
“Mark My Location” Maps
If you regularly find yourself lost in parking lots of shopping centers, concert venues, or trail hikes, then here is your best bet at getting back to where you need to be. With this feature of marking your location, the next step would be to open up Maps and see exactly where the “Marked Location” was and just like that find your way back.
This is especially useful at festivals when you need to show your friends the best kettle corn vendor before you end up forgetting the location. That is unless you marked it because let’s face it, there’s always at least ten popcorn stands at festivals.
Saved locations Uber and Lyft
Uber and Lyft have similar long-press solutions of immediately listing favorites or shortcuts for the destinations you designate with that title in-app, in Uber and Lyft, respectively. No losers here, folks.
Just a uniform standard provided by these two leading ride-sharing services so that you, the user, don’t lose ease when using either app. However, their compared prices do tend to fluctuate, so this is a quick way to compare the trips home and then decide on how to commute.
“Last Transaction” Wallet
A list is provided that will show what entity charged the linked credit card and for how much. If you’re in the habit of checking account balances and keeping up with all transactions in a timely fashion, this will be your best friend.
Loading up your profile in your bank application can take minutes, but checking the last transaction on Apple’s Wallet app takes about a second, but will only work if you’ve linked your debit/credit card with the feature.
“My Account Balance” Venmo
Additionally, in the finance corner, there is Venmo, the money service that lets you send and receive money from users without providing bank information to strangers.
A user’s funds can be accessed, transferred, or held within Venmo and are displayed as a balance. The balance is displayed right away with a long press and makes the check-in on your money discreet and hasty.
“Movies [or] Theaters” Fandango
Fandango will open a catalog of movies now showing and coming next weekend when movies is pressed. For theaters, as anyone would expect, it’s a list of theaters around the zip code you provide.
This is helpful for when you want clear times shown for a movie and not distractions present in other showtime interfaces. When the Fandango app is opened normally there is always an ad for an upcoming movie or showtime that will fill the screen, making navigating to the “movies” or “theaters” tab quite the derailment.
“Recently Closed Tabs” Safari
This long press is on the “+” sign on the bottom menu when in Safari (not private) and viewing tabs. In safari, opening a page from your recently closed tabs can reignite why you searched up previous entries. This is exciting from a user perspective to be informed of old pages that never got their deserved time and instead remained glided over until ultimately they were deleted.
And more practically, the tabs are listed literally as the page names that were closed, making it much easier to sift through over a hefty bank of Google searches in typical history backtracks.
Settings
From your home screen, the settings app can be long pressed to show battery, cellular data, WiFi, and Bluetooth, which take you to the menu pages for them without prompting you with all other settings options.
This feature highlights ease of access since these are the main reasons users are visiting the settings app so constantly. Spare the second, and then you get wireless connectivity or internet access that much faster in an age where if you’re not keeping up with technology, it won’t wait up.
Control Center
This long press is on the individual app you’d like to interact with on the control center, accessed by swiping up on your display from the base of the screen. The control center on iPhone is where you can find toggle switches for airplane mode, cellular data, Bluetooth, and WiFi, but there is also a long press function to the interface. A timer can provide great user feedback since it allows you to scroll while the counter reaches long and longer for a midday nap.
Long press the flashlight, and that’ll unveil the four levels of intensity and brightness that can be switched between. Regardless of what tools have been added to the control center, and which ones are found to be more favorable, there is no excuse to not adapt to the scroll of that timer.
“Widgets” Applicable Apps
The widget page can be reached from the iPhone home screen after swiping right. Widgets offer a little window of content into the app they represent. For any app that has a widget, a long press will show what that widget will look like. For Discover, a credit line, there is the current balance displayed along with the payment due date. Weather provides a city’s forecast, which the user sets. Google Calendars provides an overview of the days ahead and planned events.
Widgets are the one stop page that is configured to provide the most information without exhausting your battery or screen time scrolling, opening and closing each application.
