10 Useful Ways To Use iPhone Back Tap

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Back Tap on the iPhone. 

Back Tap is a way to trigger an action on your iPhone simply by tapping on the back. You can tap twice, like that, or three times to trigger an action. If you have an older iPhone without an Action Button this is a great way to trigger simply and physically without even looking at your screen and even if you have an extra button this adds two more ways to trigger things. 

The way to setup Back Tap is to go into Settings and this is under Accessibility. Then go down to the Physical & Motor section and go to Touch. Scroll down and look for Back Tap. You'll find it near the bottom. Go into it here and you'll find two settings, one for a Double Tap and one for a Triple Tap. You'll also find a switch as to whether or not a banner is shown. This is useful, especially when you're getting used to using Back Taps because you can see when one is triggered. So if you're trying to set something up and you're not sure whether it is not triggering because you're not Back Tapping correctly or there is something wrong with your settings then at east you know it is recognizing the Back Tap. So to set one of these up you just tap on the one your want. I'll do Double Tap here and then you can choose from several different kind of Actions. 

Let's first start with a very simple one here near the top. We can use Flashlight. Simply selecting flashlight means that it will toggle flashlight On or Off. A lot of times when we need to turn the flashlight on our iPhone on we may not necessarily be looking at the screen and we just want a way to do it physically. So now that I've set it to Flashlight if I just double tap, like that, you can see it turns on the flashlight. With it On another double tap will turn it Off. You can see on the screen there it indicated that it received the double tap. So that is pretty much the simplest one you can do. But let's look at some of the other options here under System and Accessibility. 

One of the things that I like to use a lot is the Magnifier. It is under Accessibility here and you can select it. This will turn on your iPhone's Camera and let you see through it magnifying what's there and letting you adjust the brightness and things like that. You can use this for reading menus with small print in dark restaurants, for instance, or reading serial numbers on the back of devices. Things like that. You can also quickly take pictures and exam things. It is really a useful utility that I use all the time. So I'm going to double tap now and you can see it turns on the Magnifier and there is it magnifying my keyboard. So that's another really useful one. Remember you have the ability here to do two. So you've got the double tap and the triple tap. So you can have one assigned, say, to the flashlight and the other to the magnifier. 

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Now one complaint that I hear a lot from people is they have a lot of trouble reproducing a certain gesture on the iPhone. It seems different for different people. Some people have trouble brings up Control Center from swiping down from the top right corner. Other people have trouble with other gestures. So you can replace a lot of gestures here very easily. For instance, you can use it as a Home Button. So right now a double tap will act like swiping up from the bottom. There's Control Center that I mentioned before. So instead of swiping down from the top right to bring up Control Center you can use a double tap to do that. You can also have it bring up the App Switcher, that's another useful one. Also Shake which is usually used to Undo. 

Now another option here listed separately from everything else is Scroll Gestures. So you can scroll down or scroll up. I'm want to scroll down and use Back Tap basically to read a webpage. so for instance here in Safari I have a long webpage. Instead of scrolling I can just double tap on the back and you can see how it scrolls up a bit, approximately one page. I can continue reading, like that. Now you can also use the Scroll Down gesture. In lots of different social media apps, particularly the short form video ones like TikTok, Instagram, and You Tube. When you're viewing You Tube shorts or Instagram Reels you can instead of scrolling up to go to the next video you can use this gesture now to actually go to the next video because it is basically simulating you scrolling with your finger on the screen just like those apps expect. 

There's so much more you can use this for. For instance you can go back here in Accessibility and go to the Vision Part. Then go to Display & Tech size. Go down to Color Filters. So you could turn on Color Filters here and you can have a color filter applied, the right color filter here. You won't see it on the screenshot there but you can adjust this. You can make it gray scale, for instance. You can do a red green filter, or this color tint. I've done a color tint and made it red and then the cool thing is that I can turn off the color filters now and then I can set the Back Tap to turn them on by simply going back in here to Touch, going to Back Tap, and then setting the double tap here to the Accessibility Color Filters. So now with the Back Tap I can go into this mode, like this, so it would be really useful, say at night, you can bring up Back Tap and get the nice red screen there so it doesn't bother you eyes as much. Then another Double Back Tap will turn it off. 

So the rest of the ideas I want to show you are for using Shortcuts with Back Tap. Shortcuts open up even more functions that you can control. So let's go into the Shortcuts App here and let's say we want to do something really simple. Like you just want to open an app. So I'm going to use the Plus button there at the top right and I'm going to search for Open. You can already see it was there before. So I can choose Open and then which app I want to open. So let's do something really simple, like the Calculator. But as you can see you can choose any app that you want. So I can now Rename this, like that, and then I've got this shortcut here that will work in Shortcuts. I can trigger it a variety of different ways. But I can also now assign it here at the Double Tap action. I juts scroll down to Shortcuts here and then I need to find it in the alphabetical list. I've got a lot here but I can choose Open Calculator. Now when I Double Tap on the back it will launch the Calculator App. So a quick way to get to an app that you may otherwise fumble around when you need it. 

Let's look at some of the other ones I've setup here. Here's one called Screenshot to File. All it is going to do is use the Take Screenshot Action and then it is going to use the Save File Action to save the results of the previous action, the Screenshot, to a folder names Screenshots. I've selected that folder. It allows you to select any file in the Files App. It only allows you to select that one once you turn off Ask Where to Save. It asks you to choose a subpath. All I've done here is I asked it to use the current date, like that. Then I've set it to Date and Time with the formats down here below so it is going to give it a file name that has the current date and time. 

Now if I go here and assign this as the Back Tap Action here there's the Screenshot to File right there. Now you can see when I use the Back Tap it will activate, take the screenshot, and now if I go into Files, there I am in that Screenshot folder, and that's the screenshot that it took. So it allowed me to skip all the stuff where I showed you a screen and all of that. It is not going to save it to the Photo app. It's just going to save it really quickly to the Files App. If you need to do more with the screenshot you can continue to add more actions to the shortcut. 

Here's a similar one that allows you to quickly add a voice memo. So with this one it creates a new recording and I left the name blank. We're just going to use the default naming in the Voice Memos App. In addition to starting the recording I'm going to open up the Voice Memos app since I'm recording and I probably want to use the Stop Button there or maybe the pause button after I start recording. The idea here is I can trigger the recording very quickly and easily. I'll switch the double tap here to record a voice memo now. Now I can just be on the Home screen or using another app. I can double tap and it will start the recording pretty quickly and take me into the Voice Memo's app.

Here's a variation on that. This is called the Emergency Messaging Record. So, you can send messages using a shortcut. In this case I'm sending an emergency message to a specific person. You can have it be more than one person as well. Then I'm using the Get Current Location Action and sending another message to that same person and it is just the current location. It is going to put the address, the closest address, to them. Then it is going to do the same thing her by creating the recording. So it is going to start Voice Memos and then lock the screen. So it is going to do all of that when I trigger the Back Tap.

Here's another useful one especially when you are out and about and looking at different things in the stores or maybe you're at the library and looking at different materials and things like that. You can set it to take a photo using the back camera and then in this case I have it Show Camera Preview. But then you can turn this off and it will just take the picture blindly. It will save the Photo to a folder in the Files App. So it is not going to add it to my Photos Library or a note or something like that. But then it is also going to use Extract Text. Extract Text from that saved file. So whatever it sees in there. Then it is going to add that to a note. You an do so much more here. You can also have it append the date and time to the note as well and even the image itself. But you can tell this works if I add this here and then I simply Back Tap here and it will open up the camera so I can do basically a quick photo like that. Use Photo. Then if I look here in the file path I'll find that photo that I took and if I look in the Notes app here and I'll see the text that it found inside of that. So you can vary that shortcut to do all sorts of useful things in exactly the way that you want. 

So what if you want more than the one or two options that you've got with the Double or Triple Back Tap. You can actually have that trigger something where it either allows you to select a shortcut or it selects a shortcut automatically based on something else. Here in my Shortcuts App Library I've got this Back Tap Shortcuts Folder here. It has all of these Back Tap shortcuts in it. I can create another shortcut. I've created one right here called Choose A Shortcut. It's going to use the Get Shortcuts From action and then I've selected that folder, Back Tap Shortcuts. So it is going to get a list of all of those. Then Choose from List will allow it to show you the list of shortcuts. Then you choose one. Then Run Shortcut from the output from that allows you to select one. So now in Settings here, for Double Tap, I can go to Choose Shortcut here. so now when I Double Tap on the back it will come up the list, the Menu, and I can choose the one that I want. So one more additional tap on the screen but it allows me to choose from a huge list of shortcuts if I like. There are variations on this you can do as well. For instance here is one that's going to use some IF statements in the Shortcuts App and check the time and see if it is before 9:00 a.m. If it is it is going to run this shortcut called Quick Weather. Then another if statement says if it is between 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. then it is going to change the volume. There are a lot of different ways to have it decide which one to run. For instance here's a shortcut that Get the Orientation. Get Orientation is just an Action and then it checks the orientation and brings it to the Landscape left it's going to add 5 minutes to the timer. You can change Landscape Left to, you know, portrait, face up or face down, all sorts of things. So you can have your Back Tap do something different depending upon how you are holding your iPhone. Getting Orientation you can look for the current Focus Mode and go with whether the Focus Mode is Sleep or Do Not Disturb or None of those and actually trigger a different action depending on that Focus Mode. 

So there is ton of different stuff to do to get even more out of Back Tap. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.