Beyond Swiping - Hidden iPhone Gestures Every User Should Know

0:00 The iPhone is one of the simplest technology devices ever invented, and what makes it easy to use is the simple and intuitive gestures that you can use all across the phone. But there are a ton of hidden and forgotten gestures that make all the difference. Do you think you know them all? Stick around and find out. I'm Dylan Stewart, the MacWhisperer, and in today's video we're going to talk about my favorite gestures on the iPhone. There's a ton of amazing gestures, and you probably know many of them, but I'll bet you don't know all of them. We're going to be dropping bonus power tips throughout this entire lesson. But make sure to stick around for the end where I reveal the two gestures I use the most, that change everything for the way I use my iPhone.

0:48 Let's hop on over to the phone and get started. The first gesture I want to talk about is one of the simplest and most basic gestures of all. It's called the tap or press gesture, and it's how we work on the phone and navigate our way around. Simply by tapping on an app like Safari it opens the app up. Once you've tapped on it, you're going to tap on other features inside of the app to do more. If you're inside of an app like. Photos you're going to tap to open the app and then tap again to get into the photos, and then you're going to tap on the different settings or the different options to do things with your photos. The tap or press gesture is super easy to use, but it's got additional features that most people don't know about.

1:34 The first one is the press and hold gesture. This is where rather than just tapping or pressing on something, we're going to press on it and keep our finger there for just a moment. It works on the home screen where you can press and hold on an app like this, and when you do, you get a popup menu that gives you options that include tools for that app. Right From here, I can create a new email message. I can search through my mail. I can see messages from my VIPs, or I can go to all of my inboxes rather than just tapping on the mail app. There's more functions that exist by pressing and holding. Let's see what kind of options we have By pressing and holding on the camera app,

2:19 pressing and holding on it, we get the option to do a selfie, to start a video, to do a portrait or a portrait selfie. Let's try that. With text messages, pressing and holding on text messages, we get options of some of the most common people I text, like my wife or my daughter or my son. when you're on the home screen and you press and hold on an app, you're going to get options for editing apps. You'll notice here we've got the option for editing the home screen. When you press that, it's going to make all of the apps wiggle and enter into edit mode where you can delete apps, reorganize them or move them around. when you press and hold on any of these apps, you'll also get options like locking the app by requiring face id. So nobody, but you can open up that specific app and removing the app, which can allow you to remove it from your homepage.

3:06 Or delete it from your phone altogether. The press and hold gesture is super valuable, but it doesn't just work on the home screen. In fact, if you pull down from the upper right hand corner and enter into your control panel, you can press and hold on all sorts of apps. Pressing and holding on the flashlight, , will give you incremental flashlight setting. Pressing and holding on the timer, will allow you to set a timer with almost any duration easily, and simply .Pressing and holding on the brightness panel will give you the option to enter into dark mode, into night shift, or into true tone. All over the control panel pressing and holding brings additional functionality like when you press and hold on your settings quadrant here. And get a full settings page with options, allowing you to change your wifi

3:53 , change your airdrop settings or even connect to a specific Bluetooth device. Press and hold works all over the place. One of my favorite uses for press and hold is inside of the keyboard. Let's open up notes and let's bring the keyboard up. Have you ever wondered how to get an accent on one of your letters? It's easy. Press and hold on the letter and you'll see all of the options there. This works for letters that have accents on them, and it even works for symbols like the dollar symbol, which can now give you all sorts of other currency symbols. If you've been hunting around trying to figure out where these additional symbols or functions are inside the keyboard, try pressing and holding, you'll be surprised by all the options that you get just by playing around. There's even a bonus power tip for press and hold, and that's

4:39 something that's called Pop and Peak. And Pop and Peak exists inside of apps like. Text messages and email. When you're inside of a message like this, sometimes you want to take a quick glance at a message without marking it as read. You can do that by pressing and holding right on it and releasing it. It'll show you a preview of that message and even give you the ability to pin that message, mark it as read, hide the alerts or delete it right from there. Let's try that in email. I'm going to open up email and press and hold on this message right here. It pops the message up and gives me the ability to reply, reply all forward. mark it as flagged, notify, move the message, trash the message, or block the senders. Press and hold mimics the right click functionality of your computer.

5:28 So if you're looking for extra functions in a app, try pressing and holding and see what happens. The next level of the tap gesture is what we call hold and drag hold, and drag is like press and hold, but with movement added to it. when you're on your home screen and you want to edit your home screen, most people will either press and hold on an app and then select where it says Edit home screen, and then make the changes. But if you learn how to use hold and drag, it can simplify that process. I'm going to press and hold on safari and then start dragging it and watch what happens. Press and hold and drag. All of a sudden, I've got this app in my hand and we're automatically in edit mode.

6:15 This allows me to move things all over the phone easily and simply, and it works all over the home screen, but it doesn't only work in the home screen. If you are inside of an app like notes and you need to take the information and copy and paste it somewhere else, maybe into an email message or a text message, you can select the message here and then press and hold on it and start to drag it. As long as you keep your finger on the screen, it's going to hold onto that information, allowing you to use your other hand to swipe up. Bring yourself in the mail, create a new message and drop it right down easily and simply. Hold and drag allows you to move things all over the phone, including photographs.

7:00 If I'm inside of photos and I want to take this cute picture and add it to a text message , I can press and hold and drag hold onto it. Swipe up, bring myself into messages. And just drop it right in, just like that. It's an easy way to drag and drop from your iPhone. But here's your second bonus power tip for hold and drag, which is multi-select. When you're using hold and drag, you can actually use it to grab multiple items. So on the home screen it would look like this. hold and drag an app. While my finger is continuing to hold it, take my other hand and start tapping on other apps. Notice what happens. They stack up under the finger that is holding and dragging.

7:49 I can now move all of these apps onto their own screen easily and simply. Just like that. Multi-select works all over the place. If you are inside of photos and you'd like to grab a handful of photos in order to move them to a text message, an email, a note, or somewhere else, you can press and hold and drag. Use your other hand and grab multiple photos like this. Swipe up, come into notes, create a new note, and just drop them right here. Super easily. It's a simple way to move things around, even when you need to move multiple items. But my favorite place to use the multi-select is inside of the Address book You see inside of our address book, we've got all of these great lists on this left panel, but it's really hard to move things into them, and you find

8:37 yourself moving things one at a time, but you don't need to, as long as you learn how to use the hold and drag from inside of your list like this. Press and hold and drag on one of your contacts, and then tap on the additional contacts that you want to grab. Once you've got everyone you need, use your other hand and tap on lists, and you can drop them into any existing list, or you can press the add list button and drop them into a brand new list Super easy and super simple. For our next section we're going to get into a gesture known as swiping. And I know right about now you're thinking to me, Dylan, I know how to swipe. I've been swiping since the first time I picked up an iPhone, and you're right.

9:24 But there are specific swiping gestures that can make things easier to do than the way you're used to doing them. We're going to start off with downward swiping, and the downward swipe is most useful for two very important functions. The first one is done by swiping from the upper left corner of your screen downward to get to your notification center. Just like this. From your notification center, you'll see a list of any notifications that have come up recently. By tapping on a set of notifications, you'll see each individual notification, and by pressing and holding on a notification, you'll get the option to respond right from your notification center without even opening up messages or emails or specific apps. But there's another function that most people overlook , and that's the

10:09 ability to swipe from the right to the left on any of these notifications. If I do that right here, swiping from the right side, I'll reveal two options, the options button and the clear button. If you do a full swipe all the way across, it will trigger the clear button and remove that notification. So with the simple swipe that brings you into the notification center, and another simple swipe on a notification, you can hit the options button and completely change what notifies you and how frequently by either muting it. Turning it off entirely, or clicking where it says view settings, which will open up the settings for that app, allowing you to make any changes that you like. For example, I don't really want reminders to alert me in this way.

10:55 A simple partial swipe, click on options and I can mute it for an hour, making it easy for me to control my notifications. With just a simple swipe. The other common downward swipe is the control panel, and the control panel is accessed by pulling down from the upper right hand corner of your screen. Just like this. The control panel shows you all sorts of applications and functions that we use on a regular basis, but with iOS 18, apple change the control panel, giving us multiple control panel pages. You can see them here. One specifically for music, one specifically for home apps and one specifically for settings. What I've seen happen frequently with iOS 18 is someone goes to access the control panel, but rather than swiping down intentionally. They swipe and keep swiping ending up on a different page than what they intended.

11:44 There are multiple pages of the control panel for a reason, but you can also customize them. So if you find yourself swiping and accidentally ending up on settings or on the homepage when you don't even have any home apps, you can remove those pages. Simply press and hold on the bottom of the screen. And when it comes up, delete any apps that you see on this page and that entire page will disappear. You can do this with any pages you don't need to have. For most people, they really only need the first page of the control panel, so by customizing your control panel, you can remove those other pages and remove the problem of swiping. And getting to something you didn't intend. And for our bonus tip for the swiping section, we're going to talk about how to access search.

12:30 Now, there are many ways that you can access search from your phone. Most commonly, you can hit the little bubble at the bottom of your phone right down here, but I don't really like having to hit tiny buttons on my phone. I've got fat fingers and I'm frequently missing those tiny little icons. Instead, you can tug down from anywhere on your home screen other than the top edge in order to get to the search page. So by simply putting your finger in the middle and tugging down, you'll end up in search no matter what home screen page you're on, making it very easy for you to search with a simple downward swipe from anywhere. But that's not the end of the swiping. When you're inside of email, you can swipe left and right to trigger actions. I can swipe from the right edge on this email to reveal the more section, the

13:18 flag section, and the trash section. I can swipe from the left side over to reveal the read or unread section and the remind me section. But the most important thing to understand when you're swiping is that there's two different kinds of swiping. There is a partial swipe where you only swipe part of the way across the screen. Like this, but there is also a full swipe, and the full swipes are very valuable, especially when you're in email. I'm going to do a partial swipe and reveal that on the far right side, the option is the trash option. What that means is that instead of doing a partial swipe, if I do a full swipe from the right side all the way to the left side. It's going to throw that message away without my having to press the separate button. So instead of a partial swipe and then an archive or delete, you can do a full swipe

14:08 all the way across and delete it quickly. The same is true from the left side. You can do a partial swipe to access, remind me, or the read section. But if you want to mark something as read or unread, you can just do a full swipe and immediately mark something as unread or read without having to click the second button, The full swipe and the partial swipe comes up all over the phone. So you'll constantly find yourself in situations like when you're in a text message where you can do a partial swipe. To mute a conversation or delete a thread or a partial swipe to mark something as read, or you can just do a full swipe to delete it right away in one fell swoop or to mark something as unread or read easily and quickly. Now let's talk about a different swipe function, called the back swipe.

15:01 You'll notice in the upper left hand corner we've got this tiny little back arrow, sure, I can carefully aim and hit that back arrow in order to go backwards , but what nobody ever told you is that there's a gesture called the back swipe, and the back swipe acts as if the entire left edge of your phone was a back button, so rather than clicking that back arrow, if I simply put my finger at the left edge and swipe, it will take me back and I can keep doing it to go back from one page to the next page, and I can use it when I'm in mail to go from my inboxes to my folders. Or I can use it when I'm inside notes to go from a specific note to my list of notes and all the way back to my folders. Or I can use it when I'm inside of a message to swipe out of the message and back to my chain of messages, or back again into my filter screen,

15:51 wherever you see the back arrow. Even inside of settings, you don't actually have to click it. If you learn to use the back swipe, a swipe from anywhere along the left edge of the phone will take you to the prior page and you can continue to swipe to go backwards from page to page to page, easily and simply. Now let's talk about a swiping gesture that works in the Photos app that nobody ever told you existed. Let's click on a photo inside of my photo library. From here, I can swipe left or right to move from one photo to the next, but when you need to get back to your library. I don't want to hit that back arrow. Instead, if you give a slight tug downwards on your photo, it will drop

16:36 you back into your photo library. And our last section of gestures is almost not a gesture. It's different ways that we can manipulate text on the iPhone. For this, I've got a note open right here with all sorts of text in it. Now most people know that you can tap almost anywhere on your screen to bring up your cursor. What they don't know is that there's other ways to move the cursor around. You don't have to tap to move the cursor. You can tap on the cursor and drag it anywhere you'd like it to go. If you want to select a word or a sentence, a double tap will select a word, but a triple tap will select an entire paragraph or a sentence, making it even easier to cut, copy, paste, or move things around when you're working with text.

17:21 You can also use your space bar as a track pad when you're anywhere with a keyboard. If you press and hold on your space bar, it will allow you to move your cursor anywhere you like simply by moving along the keyboard. This makes it so easy for you to put your cursor exactly where you need it to be without stabbing in the dark and hoping you get it onto the right part of the page. So as you can see, there's a ton of amazing gestures hidden on the iPhone that make the common things we do every day. Easier and simpler to do. But there's one more thing before I drop my power tip. If you learned a ton in this video and learn new gestures that you didn't know about, go ahead and give it a thumbs up. That goes a long way and it makes it so much easier for other people to find this video.

18:08 And if you've got a question, a comment, a gesture I left out, or something you want more information about, drop it into the comments section. I love my YouTube community and I love to hear from you guys. And if you haven't subscribed to my channel yet. I got a gesture for that too. Simply tap on the subscribe button, then tap on the notify bell, and you'll always be alerted whenever I drop new content. So with that being said, let's swipe our way right into the power tip. So we've learned so many amazing gestures from the press and hold to the hold and drag the different ways that you can swipe, whether it's a partial swipe or a full swipe. You've learned how to get into your notification center and customize it. You've learned how to get into your control panel and eliminate

18:53 the pages you don't need. You've even learned how to work with text and work with your cursor easier than ever before. So what have I got up my sleeve? Only two of my absolute favorite gestures. That's all. I use these two gestures constantly every single day. The first one is called tap to top. And the way tap to top works is that if you're inside of an app, like my address book and you're all the way at the bottom of a list or the bottom of a webpage or the bottom of a note, and you need to get back up to the top. You can certainly scroll your way back. But I'm not going to waste that kind of time. If you tap on the clock that shows up at the top of your screen, it will

19:38 immediately jump you to the top of that page, and it works in every app. So whether you're inside of the Address book, trying to get up to the A's, or if you're in Safari. And you're at the bottom of a webpage and you want to get back up to the top, a simple tap right on the clock will bring you right to the top of that page. If I'm in photos and I need to get up to the top of my library, a simple tap, and immediately I'm all the way back in 2009. And it works in notes too at the bottom of a long note. No problem. Tap to top will bring you right back to the top of that page. And my favorite use for TAP to top is inside of the Messages app. If you've ever been inside of a long conversation and you need to scroll back up to find information, you know the pain of scrolling slowly like this, a

20:26 simple tap on the clock at the top will jump you all the way back earlier in this conversation chain, and I can tap it again to go further back and further back, making it easier than ever to step into the past of this conversation chain or many of your other apps. But that's not the only power tip I've got for you today because I have the granddaddy of all gestures. This is a gesture that is a game changer and nobody knows it and nobody uses it. And after today, you're going to use it all the time. When you're inside of any app, down at the bottom of your screen, you're going to see this little black bar. We call that the home bar. You are used to using the home bar for a couple of basic gestures.

21:11 For example, when you're done with an app, you swipe up. To get back to your homepage, or if you're inside of an app, you might swipe up and hold in the middle to get to the multitasking screen. This is the screen where people are constantly quitting apps because they think that saves battery. It doesn't, guys, it's just wasting your time and it's eliminating the function I'm about to share with you. So if you're one of those people that is constantly quitting apps from this screen because you think it saves you batteries, it's time for you to stop that. It's not only not saving you battery, it's making simple things harder to do. The real reason that we have this screen is so that we can go from one app. To another app without having to go to the home screen. The problem with swiping up is that many people have very cluttered and

21:58 disorganized app pages, and you find yourself swiping and scrolling and looking for that app, and then when you find it and you get into it, you are swiping out to go find the next. And get into that. Instead, if you swipe up on the home bar and hold it in the middle, you'll get into the multitasking screen where you can quickly find the app you are just using and jump right to it without going back to the homepage. But that's not the power tip that I want to talk about. That's just the prologue for it. Because if we come into the multitasking screen, we're going to notice that here we are in notes. Next to that is mail, and next to that is messages. When I'm inside of an app, rather than swiping up to go to the homepage and rather than swiping up to get into the multitasking screen, what I do is I

22:46 swipe to the right on that home bar. What does that do? Well, it takes you to the last app you were using and the app before that, so you can quickly go from one app to the other without ever having to come up to this screen to swipe and go into it. This is most useful when you're using specific apps and jumping between them. For example, here we are on the address book and notes is right here. So a swipe to the right will get me into notes and a swipe back will get me back to the address book. You can swipe as far as you want into any of the apps you're looking for, preventing you from swiping up and starting over. If you use that app swapping tool, it will change how you use your iPhone forever because it's a complete waste of time to be in an app and then out of it.

23:34 To go to the next app you want to get into. So that's what I've got for today's video, all about my favorite gestures on the iPhone. I hope you learned a ton, but remember, there's always more to learn. Check out this video over here for even more amazing apple tips on how to use your Apple products easily and simply. I'm Dylan Stewart, the MacWhisperer, and I will see you in the comments.