Hi, this is Gary at MacMost.com. Today let's look at the coolest
hidden feature in iOS 14 for iPhone.
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So a great new feature of iOS 14 that works on most newer iPhones is called Back Tap. It
allows you to do things when you simply tap on the back of your iPhone. To enable this
go into Settings. Then from there scroll down to Accessibility.
Then look for Touch and there at the bottom should be Back Tap. You go into that and you'll
see there's two different settings. Double Tap and Triple Tap. Now you won't see this unless you
have a compatible iPhone. All the iPhones that have Face ID should have this. So if you've got
an iPhone 7 or 8 or even a brand new iPhone SE, second generation, it's not going to have this.
If there's a Home button then you're not going to be able to use Back Tap. But if you have an
iPhone 10 or 11 it should work and you should see this feature here. Now Double Tap and Triple Tap
have the same options available. Basically you can have two different Back Taps functions. One
when you hit the iPhone twice and another when you do it three times. So let's see what's possible.
Let's set a Double Tap, Back Tap command. So first you have None here at the top. If
it's set to that, of course, nothing happens. That's the default. You can also have it set
to the Accessibility Shortcut. This is usually what happens when you use three presses on the
Side Button. For instance it might bring up the Magnifier. You could simply have Double Tap to be
another way to bring up the Accessibility Shortcuts. To see your Accessibility Shortcut
go back up to the Main level of Accessibility and Scroll down to the bottom. Here you'll see
Accessibility Shortcut and you could see what that is set to. So whatever this is set to
you can then Activate with a Back Tap as well. Now you can also set the Accessibility Shortcut
to be more than one thing. So, for instance, let's add a few things here. Now when I use
the Accessibility Shortcut I'm going to Triple press on the Side Button it actually comes up
with a menu and allows me to choose which one I want. You can get the same thing with Back Tap.
Now next we've got a whole bunch of different system options here. You could see the very
first one is App Switcher. So let's turn that one on. Now if I use a Back Tap
you could see it brings up the application Switcher. Now if I do it a second time
it will dismiss the application switcher. A lot of these controls will toggle things On or Off
or go back and forth between two modes. So by setting it to App Switcher it's either turning
App Switcher on or if App Switcher is already on then dismiss it. You could also have it bring up
the Control Center. You could see it brings it up. Doing it again will Dismiss it. You can have
Back Tap act as another way to activate the Home Button. So instead of using the little line at the
bottom of the screen, which is what you're going to have if you're using an iPhone with Face ID,
you could use Back Tap to go Home. You can have your iPhone go to the Lock Screen. You could have
Mute turned on or off. So here you could see I turned it Off. I had it on before and now I
can turn it On again by using it a second time. You could bring up the Notification Center. You
could activate Reachability which is the ability on larger iPhones to drop down all the controls so
you could reach them if you're holding the Phone with one hand. A Back Tap will dismiss it as well.
The think a lot of people are using this for is to take a Screen Shot. I'm not a fan of this because
you shouldn't be taking that many Screen Shots. But if it is something you do quite often then
having a Back Tap set for this may be the way to go. You can have a Back Tap do the same thing as
a shake which usually is used for Undo. So you can use this as an Undo command. You
could bring up Siri with Back Tap. You could bring up Spotlight using Back Tap
and it also Dismisses it. You can have Volume down and Volume up. Now it wouldn't make sense
to just have one of those set to Volume down or Volume up but maybe you could have the
DoubleTap set to down and the Triple Tap set to up you could use it as a volume control.
Now there are a bunch of accessibility commands you can use. These are some of the same things
we saw before with the Accessibility Shortcut. So you can have it turn On
or Off Assistive Touch. Turn on either Classic Invert or Smart Invert. Go to the Magnifier.
Speak what's on the Screen turned On and Off. Voice over turned On and Off. Zoom. So you can
see it brings up Zoom here so I can read what's on the screen and I can Dismiss it the same way.
You could also use this for Scroll gestures. So you can have Scroll Down or Scroll Up. Or set
the Double Tap to be Scroll Down and Triple Tap to be Scroll Up. I might make sense to just use
Scroll Down if, for instance, you often end up at a webpage and you want to kind of keep
reading and having it scroll down. Or if you're using the scrolling mode in the Books app.
That's not all. You can do anything you can do in the Shortcuts app.
So here I've got all of my Shortcuts. These are things I created and I can
set Back Tap to activate any new of these. So let's create a new shortcut
and I'm going to just create a really simple one that will turn on Do Not Disturb. So I'm
going to search for Do Not Disturb and use the Set Do Not Disturb control here and I'm going
to have it turn Do Not Disturb on and off. Then I'm going to tap here and set a name for this.
Hit Done. Now I don't even need to assign this to the Home screen or anything like that. I could
just go now back into Settings and assign this to my Double Tap here. So now when I do Double Tap
it turns on Do Not Disturb. I could also create a shortcut to launch any app. So let me add a
new shortcut here and I'll search for Open App. Select that and then I could choose the app from
the list here. So I could choose Notes there as the app to open. Then let's set a name for this
and then I could use this Shortcut right here. Now when I Double Tap on the back
it will open up Notes. So it could be really useful if there's an app that
you really need to get to all the time you could set a quick shortcut so it's just a
Double Tap or Triple Tap on the back will take you right into that app.
Now I have heard a few people complain that when they put their iPhone
down on a surface it will activate the Double Tap. I could see how that would
happen.You know you hit one edge first and then the other edge kind of hits after that.
I've tried this a ton of times and I'm not able to get Double Tap to actually do anything. But if you
have this problem I imagine the solution is to only use Triple Tap instead which will be much
harder to mistakenly activate. If you're trying out Back Tap I'd love to hear what you're using it
for. Which of the functions you find most useful or what type of shortcuts you're creating for it.