iOS 18 brings lots of new ways to personalise and customise your device, but one of the features I’ve been wanting for the longest time is the ability to change your lock screen shortcuts. Yes, the camera and the flashlight can now be changed to anything you like. I’m going to go onto my lock screen and long press, then go into customise mode, just like any other lock screen change. When I’ve chosen which lock screen to edit, I then get the normal editing interface, but you will notice now that on the camera and the torch (flashlight), there’s now a little delete sign. Tapping on there will remove them from your lock screen, and you could finish here and actually have no shortcuts there at all, but I find that a bit boring. Instead, I’m going to press onto the plus sign, and then there’s a huge library of different things I can replace those two options with.

I’m going to replace the camera with a dark mode toggle, so then I can press on there and simply switch between dark and light mode whenever I want to. Don’t forget, the camera shortcut is still there because you can still swipe your lock screen sideways and open up the camera that way. For the torch, I think I’m going to add a different shortcut, so we’ll check onto there, and again I can choose anything here: accessibility shortcuts, opening different apps, anything from Control Centre essentially can be on here. I’m going to choose the translate one because it’s got a cool functionality.

Okay, with those two shortcuts chosen, I’m going to press ‘Done’ in the top corner and then go back to my lock screen as normal. From here, if I long press the translate button, just like you’d long press the torch, I then have this new Dynamic Island interface where it will immediately start listening and translating in real-time. How useful is that? For your device to have a translate button on the lock screen! But of course, it doesn’t just have to be translate; there are hundreds of options here to make your device exactly what you want it to be.

This is far, far from the only way to customise your device this year with iOS 18. In fact, there are so many different things that you can change under the surface that make your device that much more personal and useful to you. If you want to learn more, you can check out my YouTube channel where there are hundreds more videos all about different things your iPhone can do that perhaps you didn’t realise. Or if you want some iOS 18 content, check out the ebook I’ve written below, “100 Quick Tips for iOS 18.” And that’s it, I’ll see you next time.