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How to use ‘Back Tap’ to Control your iPhone by tapping it

20th September 2020

Jacob Woolcock

1:28

In this short tutorial I’ll show you how to use the one of the secret new features of iOS14 to control your iPhone in a fun and useful new way. Using the hidden Back Tap feature you can tap the back of your phone to control it! Tap twice or three times and customise what happens for each. I set mine up to show the Control Center on a double tap and to bring up Assistive Touch for three taps – but you could take a screenshot, open an app, mute the phone, activate Siri or even run a custom shortcut of your own. This feature is super powerful, but super hard to find.

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Here’s a great new feature that will have you using your phone in a way you’ve never imagined you could do before. To get started, we’ll jump straight into the Settings app, and then we’re going to scroll down and find ‘Accessibility’. From here, you want to find the option for ‘Touch Controls’. Now on this screen, go right to the bottom, and you should then have the option for ‘Back Tap’. Okay, ‘Back Tap’ will give you two options: you can choose a double tap or a triple tap, and basically, when you tap on the back of your iPhone, it will activate whatever shortcut you choose.

Let’s go to ‘Double Tap’ first of all, and you can see there’s quite a lot of options here. For me, I want to choose ‘Control Center’. That means I won’t have to drag down from the top right corner anymore; I can just tap my phone twice on the back, and it will launch Control Center, just like this. You could use any of these actions to trigger your own custom shortcut as well, which might open an app or perform a certain function on your device. For me, though, I want to use a triple tap to bring up the ‘Assistive Touch’ menu. This will bring up that little floating home button on your screen, which you can then use to control different aspects of the accessibility features on your device.

Give it a try. It’s really easy to tap on the back of your iPhone and have all these cool things happening, and it really does open up a way of interaction you’ve never been able to do before on your iOS device.

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