20 iOS 11 tips and tricks you need to know to master your iPhone or iPad

The finished version of iOS 11 has been pushed out by Apple and it introduces all kinds of goodies.

It’s particularly good on iPad, for which it blurs the lines between mobile and macOS, but it has some fantastic features for iPhone too.

We’ve already seen what features Apple has put into iOS 11, so now it’s time to explore the little and big ways iOS 11 can make your Apple life even lovelier.

These are our favorite iOS 11 tips and tricks that we think you need to know about.

Turn to the dark side

If iOS 11 is too white for you, it’s easy to make it darker: go into (deep breath…) Settings > General > Accessibility > Display Accommodations > Invert Colors and switch on Smart Invert.

Unlike a normal invert, which reverses the colors of everything on screen, Smart Invert doesn’t mess with images and other media: it’s effectively a Dark Mode for iOS.

Get 3D Touch without 3D Touch

If your iPhone (or iPad) doesn’t support 3D Touch, which enables you to get additional options by hard-pressing icons, iOS 11 brings something very like it to the Control Center - but not to the rest of iOS.

If you long-press the buttons in Control Center you’ll get the 3D Touch actions, so for example long-pressing the torch icon brings up the torch’s intensity settings, while doing the same on the timer allows you to easily and quickly adjust its length.

Give Siri the finger

One of the big problems with voice-controlled devices is that you don’t always want to use your voice: “Hey, Siri! Search the web for fungal foot cream!” isn’t something you generally want to shout on the bus.

If you go into Settings > General > Accessibility > Siri and enable Type To Siri, long-pressing on the Home button brings up the keyboard. “Hey Siri” still works, and if you’ve enabled voice feedback that still works too.

Block FaceTime photography

The new FaceTime Live Photo feature is fun and enables you to take a photo without the on-screen interface bits showing, but it also means somebody can take a Live Photo of you mid-call.

If you’d rather not let that happen, you can disable the Live Photo option by going into Settings > FaceTime - but bear in mind that all you’re disabling is this specific feature, not iOS’s ability to take screenshots.




Don’t leave unwanted messages on other devices

There’s another big benefit to Messages’ new cloud-based system: if you’ve enabled Messages on iCloud then when you delete a message on one of your devices, it’s deleted from every device.




That means the end of the possibly disastrous privacy loophole where you need to manually delete messages from all your devices.

You'll have to enable this option from your iPhone, as it's not available in the iPad settings.