5 more secret iPhone gestures you need to know

Here are a few secret tricks and gestures that will help you get around your iPhone faster. These hidden gestures help you text pictures to your friends faster, scroll through big pages and screens, type special characters and use your phone one-handed.

This is a follow-up to an earlier article with three other secret iPhone gestures you need to know. Learn all of these gestures and you’ll feel like an iPhone power user.

5 more secret iPhone gestures you should learn

You can see the gestures in action in our video:

1. Tap and hold + to add a picture

The recently updated app menu in the Messages app benefits from a much cleaner design than before. However, it’s annoying that it takes three taps to add a picture to a message, since that’s what people use it for most often. There’s actually a secret shortcut to add an image to a message. Tap and hold on the + button to jump straight into your photo library.

2. Grab the scroll bars to get to the bottom of a webpage or list

If you open a huge article in Safari or want to speed through a very long list, you don’t need to madly swipe up and down — and down and down. Just tap and hold on the gray scrollbar on the right of your screen. When using this hidden iPhone gesture, you will feel a little haptic click. Then, you can quickly scroll up and down the page with ease.

3. Tap on the status bar to scroll back to the top

In a similar vein, say you want to jump all the way back to the top of a webpage or document in Safari. Simply tap on the status bar on the top of the screen, by the clock or the battery icon. That smooth move will jump you straight to the top of the list. Just be careful of the Dynamic Island on newer iPhones — it’s easy to hit that rather than the slivers of space around it.

4. Tap-and-hold the keyboard for special characters

When typing on your iPhone keyboard, you might want to add special characters for properly spelling résumé or Cæsar — or to type an em dash. ¿How do you do it? It’s easy with this hidden iPhone gesture. From the virtual keyboard, tap and hold on a letter to see variations with accents or similar characters. (You can use this with certain emoji, too, to see skin-tone variations.)

5. Reach the top of your iPhone screen with one hand

If you need to reach something on the top of the screen one-handed, especially if you have an iPhone Pro Max or Plus, it might be a stretch. Instead, you can use the Reachability feature built into iOS. To enable Reachability, just swipe down on the Home Bar. The whole screen will slide down for you. Tap on the blank upper half to exit Reachability and move the screen back up.

(Odds are, you triggered Reachability accidentally in the past. If you find the feature more annoying than useful, you can turn it off in Settings > Accessibility > Touch by turning off Reachability.)

We originally published this post about secret iPhone gestures on November 25, 2023. We updated the information.