Apple added a secret button to your iPhone, and you may not have even noticed

Author: brundolf

Score: 40

Comments: 12

Date: 2020-10-30 19:02:29

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eyelidlessness wrote at 2020-10-30 19:51:03:

When various swipe gestures were introduced, a lot of folks (rightly) said it was an unusually undiscoverable move for Apple (the same was said of trackpad gestures on their laptops). I still see people doing far more interaction than necessary to accomplish certain tasks that have simple gestures available. And with force touch/long press, that got even more complicated, as some gestures can trigger different behavior if you press too hard/long (made more likely if your screen is cracked; I often accidentally go into the task switcher when I meant to go back in Safari).

All of that being said, while this is even less discoverable by far, it’s good that they’ve made it optional _and_ arbitrarily configurable. Also a fairly unusual thing for Apple, though less so in the Cook era.

OldHand2018 wrote at 2020-10-30 21:16:00:

I felt like Apple has done so much to the OS that I downloaded the User Guides for iOS14 and macOS 14 from the Apple Book store.

These are huge guides! I just looked it up in the iOS guide and it is listed in there, but it is not listed in the “What’s New” section. I’m thinking that the “What’s New” section is only for big things, but whoa, that’s a lot of stuff to search through to find new “small” features!

jiofih wrote at 2020-10-30 22:29:47:

Meh. This was innovative back in 2009 on Sony / Motorola phones. They actually went further and had haptic feedback, capacitive sensing on the back, or infrared sensors for “wave” type motion detection.

sswezey wrote at 2020-10-31 00:45:12:

I’ve set mine up for Spotlight. Now from any app it’s a quick double tap to open just about anything else on my phone.

runawaybottle wrote at 2020-10-31 03:58:40:

Hmm, interesting. A cheap touchscreen on the back of the phone could really improve one handed usability. The larger phones really make you reach for things. Would love to be able to claw a few gestures on the back of the phone like unselecting an autocorrect (which always has me hovering over the autocorrect bubble, but I’d love to just swipe with my index or middle finger on the back to ignore autocorrect for the word).

Two finger swipe on the back could shuffle browser tabs. This feels like a no brainer, what’s stopping this from being implemented?

solarmist wrote at 2020-10-30 19:36:09:

Very cool. Also available on my iPhone 11.

justusthane wrote at 2020-10-30 19:42:18:

Works on my iPhone 8 as well, and works pretty well even through an Otterbox case (although I find I need to tap the phone basically hard enough so that I can hear it in order to trigger it).

baybal2 wrote at 2020-10-30 22:38:14:

Knuckle gestures on Huawei Android are basically the same

evolve2k wrote at 2020-10-30 20:09:40:

Which iPhone upwards does it work from? Article didn’t say.

samfromnz wrote at 2020-10-30 21:38:11:

After not being able to find the setting on my 1st gen SE, I wondered this too.

Apparently it’s: iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone X, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max. (and I assume the iPhone 12 models too)

lokimedes wrote at 2020-10-30 21:13:43:

I made a flashlight shortcut. Works well but I’d liked the gesture to be available with the screen off as well.

ouid wrote at 2020-10-30 22:34:05:

This is like that time a couple years ago when Apple added a way for you to use headphones with your phone.