The brilliant new StandBy feature for iPhone is really customisable, and when you’re in StandBy mode – so when your iPhone is horizontal or on a charger – you can actually customise exactly what you see. Now, I’ve made videos on changing how the clock looks and changing other various cosmetic things, but the widgets here are also customisable. If I swipe horizontally, I can go between the clock, the photos, and the widget screens. And on the widget screen, if I tap and hold on one of those two halves, I actually get a widget picker just like I would on my home screen on the iPhone.

Now, you might notice I’ve got quite a few widgets here already, and I can swipe up and down between them. This is what’s called a Smart Stack, just like you might have on your home screen. This is when your iPhone will try and predict what widget you want at what time, and it will cycle through automatically. I’m going to make a screen to go on my desk by my office when my phone’s on charge, so I want to actually choose two widgets to be here all the time. So, I’m going to tap and hold on the right-hand widget, and then I’m going to turn off Smart Stack. From here, I’m going to add a new widget. At the moment, there are only Apple widgets on my screen here, but by the time you’re watching this, there’ll be loads of third-party apps, so all the other apps you use will have their widgets here as well. I’m going to go into music, and I’m going to add this Now Playing widget. And just like I mentioned with those Smart Stacks, I’m going to turn off Smart Rotate and make sure it stays on the music screen for me.

Because there’s an interactive widget, I can also use this to play and pause my music. Then, on the left-hand side, I want to customise this as well, to make it a HomeKit widget, so I can turn on my fan and my lights in the office straight from my StandBy screen. Again, I’m going to turn off that Smart Rotate. And because it’s a widget, just like anywhere else on the iPhone, when you select the widget – in this case, Home – I can tap it again to edit the different things in that widget. For this one, I’m going to add the four items that I want manually, and then I can have that widget locked in place too. When I come out of the editing screen, I’ve now got my HomeKit on the left and my music on the right, all of which is fully interactive. So, I can tap on a light to turn it on, or tap on the fan. And if I want to go to my music controls when a song is playing, all I’m going to do is tap the little sneaker icon at the top, and that brings up this beautiful full-screen music view. Obviously, from here, I can change tracks and all those sorts of things. And at the bottom, if I swipe this away, I go back to my StandBy screen that I’ve now fully customised.

And that’s just another thing on iOS 17 that you can do to make your iPhone better and more useful than ever. If you want to learn what else is new, check out this playlist on the end screen now. And if you like this video and you want to learn more about the iPhone, please do subscribe to my channel down below, and you won’t miss any iPhone QuickTips in the future.