iPhone How-To

In several states, Apple’s state ID initiative enables iPhones and Apple Watches to hold a digital copy of the user’s driver’s license, in the same way these devices store credit cards and airline tickets. And across the United States, you can create an Apple Digital ID based on your passport that can get you through some airport security checks. 

The day when an iPhone can completely take the place of an old-fashioned wallet remains years away, but it’s a goal Apple is working toward. Apple Pay is making progress on replacing credit cards, you can put airline tickets in the Wallet app, and the same goes for loyalty cards.

But no wallet is complete unless it can hold an ID. And that’s where Apple’s digital ID initiative comes in. Here’s what you need to know to add your driver’s license, state ID or federal passport to your Apple Wallet.

If you feel like every photo you take looks boring and overprocessed, you can change your iPhone camera settings to take natural, lo-fi pictures.

Turning down the exposure can prevent the photo from looking unnaturally bright (and more like something shot on an older digital camera). If you have a newer iPhone, you can even change its Photographic Style to “Natural,” for better-looking colors. A few quick trips into the Settings app can turn off the lens distortion on the Ultra Wide and selfie cameras, for that pure fisheye look. 

You can even take things a step further and download a different camera app — one that captures totally unprocessed photos straight from your iPhone’s sensor. 

Here are my top tips for taking lo-fi iPhone photos.

There are two types of iPhone owners in the world: Those with a carefully manicured, minimalist Home Screen of perfectly arranged icons, and those with random icons spilled haphazardly across the screen.

If you find yourself among the latter group, you might think that it’s too late for you — that making a beautiful, aesthetic Home Screen is beyond your creative ability. 

Well, cleaning up your iPhone’s Home Screen is a lot easier than clearing out your basement or organizing your kitchen junk drawer. A Home Screen that works better and looks better comes down to just a few simple tips. You can set one up in just minutes.

Here’s how.

Safari’s Hide Distracting Items feature lets you remove ads from your iPhone, along with other elements on the page that irritate you. It doesn’t require an ad blocker or a paid extension — Apple built it right into the browser.

Hide Distracting Items is not an ad blocker per se. But if pop-ups and other items that cover the page with no obvious close button pester you (like a cookie banner) Hide Distracting Items can come to the rescue. Here’s how to use it — keep reading or watch our video.

You can easily hide photos and videos on your iPhone to keep secret and/or illicit images out of your main Photos library. Hiding items from the camera roll makes sure nobody except you can see your embarrassing pictures, salacious nudes or old selfies with your ex.

Apple introduced the Hidden photo album years ago in iOS 8. But after Apple redesigned the Photos app in iOS 18, you can no longer find it at the bottom of the Albums tab — because the tab bar is gone. But in iOS 26, it’s back again!

Here’s what hiding photos does to your iPhone, how you can stash those incriminating or mortifying pix, and where to find them.

The Apple Passwords app makes it easier than ever to save login details for your apps, start using passkeys and create shared groups.

The time of using the same password on all your internet accounts is over. Apple’s password manager is free, syncs everywhere (even with Windows PCs) and is incredibly easy to use. It creates strong passwords and automatically fills them in, so you never need to.

Here’s how it works.

You can easily remove any object from a photo using Apple Intelligence’s free Clean Up tool on your iPhone, Mac or iPad. It works fairly well — but it’s good to know its limitations.

As the only graphic designer among my friends, I’ve frequently been asked over the years to Photoshop unwanted elements out of pictures. Take, for example, a romantic shot of a couple in a gazebo, with a phone sitting on the handrail in an obvious spot. The image might look a lot better if you delete that stray device.

Or imagine a group photo from a fun night out, with someone’s dumpy tote bag sitting by their feet, or a picture from a big conference that shows an ugly lanyard around someone’s neck. With Apple Intelligence’s free Clean Up feature, anyone can make the tote bag and the lanyard disappear, right from their iPhone.

Now, you have the power to clean up your own photos — a chance to make your almost-perfect shots perfect in an instant. 

You can record a phone call on your iPhone for future reference using a built-in tool. This feature is a great way to refer back to a previous conversation. Who said what? What date did they say? What exactly did you agree to?

If your device supports Apple Intelligence, you’ll get transcriptions of the phone calls, too. They’ll go in a Call Recordings folder in the Notes app.

If you used a shady call recording app before, you can bid it adieu. There’s a convenient button built right into the Phone app. Here’s how it all works.

iMessage effects can add extra meaning, emotion and fun to your texting. In Apple’s Messages app, you can add bold, italics, underline and strikethrough text, just like in a formatted document. You can even choose from a bunch of cool, animated effects, including full-screen blasts of lasers, confetti and fireworks.

Apple’s text message effects can make quite an impression. You can make congratulations more bombastic (to rejoice in someone’s finest moments). Or, you can use formatting and effects to convey sarcasm, stress and sorrow more clearly.

These text effects are fun and incredibly useful. Keep reading below or watch our video.

Apple Music Classical is an iPhone app specifically designed to deliver a great experience browsing and listening to instrumental music. Apple carefully curated its catalog of millions of tracks, tagging them by composer, work, movement, instrument, orchestra, artist and more.

Why does there need to be a separate app for classical music? Apple says it succinctly on its support page: Classical music “has longer and more detailed titles, multiple artists for each work, and hundreds of recordings of well-known pieces.” This app “is designed to support the complex data structure of classical music.”

This is how to discover, find, add and listen to music in Apple Music Classical.

If you know how to schedule texts on iPhone, you can make sure you never forget to send a reminder, birthday greeting or early morning message for someone in a different time zone. You can schedule a whole slew of texts up to a week in advance, with links, photos, attachments and more, using the iPhone’s Send Later feature.

This can save your bacon if you’re the type of person who forgets to text someone later. And it’s really easy to do, once you figure out how to use the somewhat hidden feature. Watch our quick video.

If you forgot your new iPhone passcode, you can reset it with your old one up to three days later. This can save you hours of trying to remember the new passcode, or worse, resetting your phone from a backup.

You just have to tap Forgot Passcode? on the Lock Screen after you enter it several incorrect times.

Keep reading for a detailed walkthrough. And don’t worry — if you change your passcode intentionally to keep someone out, you can instantly expire your old one.

The Camera Control button on the iPhone opens the Camera app, takes pictures and can even adjust camera settings on the fly. It offers a quick shortcut to using one of the most popular and important iPhone features.

By default, it’s a simple button to quickly take pictures, but there’s so much more you can do with it — if you choose. The physically clicking button also accepts touch input when you swipe your finger along it. And it utilizes pressure sensitivity and haptic feedback for you to adjust different camera settings. 

Learn how to master the iPhone’s Camera Control button in our guide below, or watch our quick video.

If you’re working in an office or in the city, you’re probably inundated with noise from people chattering, cars running and nearby music. Your iPhone has a built-in feature called Background Sounds for playing rain noises or white noise to tune it all out.

Or, if you work at home and want some of that office or coffee shop ambiance, you can add some of those chatter sounds back in. You can even simulate a commute, with sounds of a bus, train, airplane or even boat.

You don’t need to download any apps or pay a cent. Background Sounds is a free feature on your iPhone, iPad and Mac. Let me show you how it works.

You can change out your iPhone Lock Screen buttons from the standard flashlight and camera icons to whatever you want. There’s a huge selection of buttons you can swap in their place. Just about any button you can put in Control Center is a button you can put on your iPhone’s Lock Screen.

Plus, you can assign different shortcut buttons on different Lock Screens, making them context-dependent (and tied to a Focus Mode if you like). Apple offers a standard selection, but your options will vary depending on what apps you’ve installed.

Here’s how to swap out the iPhone Lock Screen buttons to put whatever you want at your beck and call.

Apple Music comes with a karaoke mode for people who love to sing along as they listen. It’s called Apple Music Sing, and it lets you turn down the lyrics in your favorite songs with just a tap. 

It’s much nicer than searching out karaoke versions of songs on YouTube. Those often don’t use the original backing track, but re-create it (with varying levels of quality). Also, if you’re still learning a song, Apple Music Sing can keep some of the original vocals to guide your singing.

Apple’s Focus modes are a powerful way to change how your iPhone, iPad and Mac look and feel whether you’re driving, sleeping, relaxing or working. It’s all about fully immersing yourself in whatever you’re doing.

You can change all kinds of things: from who can reach you and which apps send notifications to custom Lock Screens, Home Screens and more. The tools can totally transform how your phone looks and works based on context. You don’t need all the same apps and widgets on your Home Screen while you’re at work or yoga as you do at home. 

Setting up a Focus with rich customization makes your phone more personal. Keep reading to find out how.

Apple released new firmware for AirPods Pro 3, AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4 this week. The new version, 8B39, offers bug fixes for these in-ear headphones.

Last year, Apple finally explained exactly how to update your AirPods firmware. The process can happen automatically, in the background, but there is a way to speed things up. It’s a good idea to manually check that you’re running the latest version, which brings bug fixes and sometimes great new features.

Read on for more details, and find all current AirPods firmware versions, along with instructions for getting the AirPods update as quickly as possible.

Studies show that a haptic keyboard improves touchscreen typing speed and input accuracy, but very few people know you can enable it on your iPhone.

Android phones years ago had haptic keyboards, but without a precision vibration motor, the feedback was too slow to make the illusion really work. With the Taptic Engine — hardware in every iPhone since the iPhone 6s that can simulate all kinds of vibrating textures — Apple created a perfectly convincing effect to enable the haptic keyboard.

Read on to see where to enable it — or watch our quick video.

If you’re tired of your kids’ or partner’s music polluting your music recommendations and history, there’s a solution. While Apple Music does not offer a built-in private mode, you can make your own using a Focus mode.

Turn on a special Focus mode, and Apple Music will ignore all the songs, artists and albums that play next.

It’s even possible to enable your private mode when you connect to a specific Bluetooth speaker, like a living room sound system. Or when you enter a specific location, like work. Here’s how to set it up — keep reading or watch our quick video.

Upcoming iOS 26 feature Apple Music Concerts solves one of music lovers’ biggest heartbreaks — finding out too late that your favorite artist already passed through your neighborhood on tour, unbeknownst to you.

The feature lets you see shows coming soon to your city, with convenient details on venues, ticketing, set lists and more. You can also look up an artist’s tour and see all their upcoming shows.

Supposedly, Apple Music Concerts will even notify you when a tour is coming nearby. The feature, available now in iOS 26.4 beta 2, hasn’t been out long enough for me to test. But if it works like the Apple Music notifications that alert you about new tracks, it could be a lifesaver.

Unfortunately, though, there’s one serious drawback. Here’s an overview of Apple Music Concerts. 

A hidden gesture on the iPhone and iPad lets you quickly select a bunch of items in a list — kind of like Command-A (⌘A) for Select All on a Mac. I use it all the time to select a bunch of emails to archive, a bunch of reminders to rearrange, a batch of files to sort, etc. 

Once you learn this two-finger swipe gesture, you’ll use it everywhere. It’s great for getting work done on the go with your phone. Watch our quick video or keep reading.

Accidentally texting the wrong person can bring disastrous consequences, and yet it’s incredibly simple to mix up threads. Luckily, iOS 26 offers a great way to keep things straight: You can add specific backgrounds to various Messages conversations on your iPhone so you can easily tell them apart.

For instance, if you set a shimmery blue background for your group chat with co-workers, you’ll never confuse that conversation for a sensitive one-on-one text with your closest colleague. You’ll never accidentally send a message to your boss meant for your partner if the chats look obviously different.

Setting up an iPhone Messages background is super-easy — here’s how it works.

Apple News gives you a streamlined way to keep up with current events. It’s a sane, if somewhat generic-looking, way to stay on top of the news that matters to you. If you want more, Apple News+ offers paywall-free access to major publications, local news and magazines. And to sweeten the deal, it has fun daily puzzles, excellent recipes and audio stories.

Admittedly, not a lot of people pay for Apple News+ on its own. It’s hardly a fan favorite. But if you have the Apple One Premier bundle, you can enjoy all of its hidden benefits — here’s how to make the most of it. Keep reading or watch our quick video. 

All the tiny signs, symbols and icons on the Apple Music app’s Now Playing screen lack labels — and it’s not obvious at all what they do. Do you know what tapping the infinity symbol does? How about the two wavy lines? 

This quick guide runs through all the Apple Music buttons and controls, so you can get acclimated to its interface. Keep reading or watch our short video.