Is Your iPhone Control Center This Powerful?

0:00 control center on your iPhone and iPad may be a lot more powerful than you thought. Here's my best tips and tricks for getting the most out of it. Before I get into it, if you want to keep up to date with the latest Apple news and reviews, hit that subscribe button. In my opinion, Control Center is the unsung hero of your iPhone and iPad. It can do almost anything and is accessible from anywhere. I'm going to start with admittedly some of the basics before getting into some of the really cool stuff. If you want to jump ahead, feel free and use the chapter markers down below. With out of the way, let's get it. To access Control Center, you simply swipe down from the top right corner of your screen. This works from anywhere, the lock screen, the home screen, or

0:48 from within apps. When you pull down, you can quickly pull down to get to the main view, but you can keep dragging down to go to your additional pages. There are dedicated sections for media playback, your home, and connectivity options. To use any of the controls, just tap them. Many though also support long holds, like tapping and holding on the brightness allows you to toggle dark mode, night shift, and true tone. Lastly, for the basics, the top right corner has a power button you can use to quickly turn your device off. Prior to iOS 18, you used to be able to change a lot of the settings for control center in the actual settings app. Now, that

1:34 space has been largely abandoned, but there are two options I want to point out. If you go to settings, control center, you can turn off control center access within apps, and you can reset it. Sometimes it just gets in the way while you're in an app, like you're invoking it accidentally. So, it's nice to be able to disable that if you want. And I hope you're all kind of experimenting with control center right now. So, if you feel like you made a mess, you can just reset it and start over. Now, let's get into customizing it. Can I show you a little behind thescenes magic? When filming, I need to make sure my iPhone looks pristine. I get so many comments if there is even as much as a scratch on it. So, I always use a screen protector to protect it from keys and other things that may make

2:22 contact with it, whether on my desk, in my pocket. Last time though, I picked up a super cheap one. Look at this thing. Like, it's literally breaking off pieces of glass and stabbing me. It was fortuitous that ESR wanted to sponsor this video to promote their latest Ultra Fit glass screen protectors. They can literally be installed in under 10 seconds. I used to be the person people came to to install screen protectors because they were so hard. Not anymore. Just slip in your phone, pull the tab, and you're good. It even removes the dust for you. They are ultra strong, repel water for a perfectly smooth surface, and so clear you'll barely even notice it's there. I may not often use cases, but I cannot go without a screen

3:08 protector. The screens just scratch too easily, which really hurts that resale value. Plus, the Ultra Fit screen protector is available for iPad models as well. Try the ESR Ultra Fit screen protectors for yourself. Get three in a box, and they're linked in the description. If you tap and hold on any of the empty space inside of Control Center, it'll take you into edit mode. Or you can tap on that plus button in the top left corner. While in edit mode, you can remove any existing control by tapping the minus button in the corner or resize them by dragging the handle in the lower right. Tap and hold to move any of them around. The more you add, the more pages there will be. So, you can add more than one page full of controls. If you want to add controls,

3:56 tap the add control button at the bottom, which brings up a big list. All of the apps are categorized so you can see them by app as well as function. Of course, Apple has plenty of default ones like for Apple Intelligence, the clock, connectivity, and more. Depending on what apps you have installed, you'll see a bunch of third-party ones in the mix. This started with iOS 18 where developers can build out these mini actions that can go in control center, the action button, or on the lock screen. Share your favorite third party controls down below in the comments so I and everyone else can check them out. There's a lot of great ones like dark noise, mango baby, bulletin, sofa, and more. I'm curious at what you all use the most. Before I get into the more fun things, I have a small request. Send

4:43 this to someone you know to help them get the most out of Control Center. It would really help me out. Anyway, here are the best little known additions to Control Center. First, the Apple TV remote. This used to be a whole app. Now, it's baked entirely into Control Center. Just tap it and it opens up a mini app where you can choose your Apple TV, quickly mute or power it off, and control playback. Plus, if you tap the name at the top, you can use it to track your physical Apple TV remote, too. Pretty cool. Next, smartome controls. This is one of those little AI areas Apple's experimenting with. As you use Apple Home or formerly HomeKit, it'll start to show different scenes and accessories based on when and where it

5:29 thinks that you'll need them. Like if you open the shades at a certain time out of habit every day, it may show you those shades in control center for you to get quick access. Right now, it's getting kind of late, so it's actually showing me my good night scene there because I run it every night. It's really helpful and it gets better over time with this machine learning model that shows what you need and when you need it, at least for smart home controls. Just make sure when you add the control, you leave the suggestions option on. Another one of my favorites is technically an accessibility setting. It's sound recognition. Your device uses ondevice intelligence to listen for background noises and alert them to you. When you add it to control center, you

6:14 can toggle on what you want to be alerted to. For example, while I'm working with headphones on, I could be alerted to a knock at the door, a doorbell, or even my kid crying. There's a lot of applications for you besides those experiencing hearing loss. What about Apple Watch users? Many know you can use your Apple Watch to find your iPhone. Did you also know it works in reverse? Yeah. You can add a tool to help ping your watch. So if you took it off, left in bed, fell on the couch, whatever, you can find it. Then there are ambient sounds. This is another secret app only available through Control Center. You add any of the four ambient sounds that Apple

6:59 offers. They're there to help you focus, sleep, relax, and just be yourself. When you play them, they start showing in the dynamic island, and when you tap on it, it opens up a whole faux app. These are really great, and you should for sure check them out if you haven't done so already, cuz they were just added to iOS. Finally, the big one, shortcuts. Come on, if all of these options from Apple and third party weren't enough controls, you can do more from here, too. Just add the shortcut control and choose any from the third party apps or Apple that you have. I could run one to get my blood sugar instantly. Or I can launch the Apple frame shortcut to add like a phone around my screenshots. What

7:45 I think is crazy is that many apps have more shortcuts than they do regular controls. Like carrot weather, for example, they're only two control center controls. One for weather, one for maps. But if you add a shortcut, you can get the current weather, hourly forecast, the daily forecast, or the weather map. Carrot isn't the only one to do this either. There are so many shortcut options. Apple even just added a new shortcut called Hold That Thought that is super useful to add here. Hold that thought literally will like take a screenshot, look at your calendar appointment, and save all that as a note. And then you can even like add little notes to it. And then later on you can run the shortcut again and hit recall and it'll tell you what the last thing you were doing is. So if you're like you're getting interrupted or something, you can just hit hold that

8:31 thought. It'll save everything down for you. Then you could bring it back later. It's such a cool little thing. So that's it. That's my spiel on control center. I hope it was helpful and let me know your best use cases down below in the comments. Otherwise, subscribe and I'll see you all in the next