Alternatives To the iPhone Action Button

If you don't have an iPhone 15 Pro with the action button, you can still easily trigger a variety of actions using on-screen buttons, tapping the back of the iPhone, pressing the side button or even the volume buttons.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some alternatives to the Action button that you can use on older iPhones. 
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Now the Action Button is a great new feature of the iPhone 15 Pro and ProMax. It gives you this extra button on the side of your iPhone that you can customize to perform a variety of different actions. But if you're using an iPhone without an Action Button there is still a variety of ways that you can easily and quickly trigger an action. 
So most of what I'm going to show you will trigger a shortcut. Shortcuts allow you to perform a variety of different actions including some of the built-in things that the Action Button does. So if you go into the Shortcuts App here, for instance, I've got a folder of shortcuts called Action Buttons. I just named the folder that and it does a variety of things. For instance, in the Flashlight shortcut here it just toggles the flashlight on or off. The Calculator one will just launch the Calculator App. Gaming Focus will switch to Gaming Focus, and I have one called Record Voice Memo which will open the Voice Memo's App and start a new recording. This is just an example of some of the things that you can do in Shortcuts. There's so much else. But what I'm going to talk about here is how to trigger these without an Action Button. 
So one way to do it is just by running the Shortcut. Now, of course, you can go into the Shortcut App and tap on the different Shortcut buttons here to trigger the shortcut. But you want something a little quicker than that. You can place an icon on your Home Screen to do this by going to the Shortcut that you want. So I'm going to use this Flashlight one here. I'll tap on the three dots button at the upper right hand corner of it and then I will tap the Info button there at the bottom. You can see I can Add To Home Screen. I can customize it a little bit if I want. I'm just going to stick with the icon and name I chose and click Add. Now you can see there's Flashlight added to my Home Screen. I can turn it On or turn Off the flashlight just with that button. 
Now you can also Tap and Hold an icon and Edit the Home Screen and now I can remove one of the icons from the Dock at the bottom and add this one to it. This way it is available no matter which screen I'm on. 
Now you can also add a widget to the Home Screen. So I'm going to tap and hold either an icon or somewhere else and everything wiggles. I can tap the Plus button there and I can scroll down to Shortcuts and add a shortcut widget. Now it doesn't make sense to use the large single shortcut widget. But if you use one of the larger ones, like a group of four here, then you get to add this widget here with four different things in it. If I tap it I can choose a folder. So I'm going to actually choose that Action Button folder that I created before. So it's got those four actions in it.That's just another easy way to trigger a shortcut action from your Home screen.
But one of the great things about the Action Button is you don't actually need to do anything on your screen. It's a physical button on the side. So, there is one way you could do that without a button at all. That's to use the Back Tap functionality. Go into Settings and then go down to Accessibility. Then go to Touch. Then scroll all the way to the bottom to Back Tap. Now you've got either a Double Back Tap or a Triple Back Tap. All you need to do is simply tap the back of your phone with your finger right in the middle and you can trigger something. So for the Double Tap, for instance, there are a whole bunch of different system things I can do. So, I could actually just turn the flashlight On or Off without creating a shortcut first. I can Mute and do a whole bunch of different things. But for ultimate control you can go down to the Shortcuts Section and you'll find your Shortcuts. So there is that Calculator launching one I did. So now if I have that one set as by Double Back Tap, when I double back tap my iPhone it will bring up the Calculator App. The great thing is you can actually setup two separate actions. One for the double tap and one for the triple tap. 
Now there is another way to also use a physical button to trigger any shortcut you want. But it is a little bit messy. If you go to the top level of Accessibility and then you scroll all the way down to Accessibility Shortcut you can actually trigger a lot of different things by triple pressing the side button on your iPhone. Now if one of these things isn't what you want to do you can actually trigger a shortcut. But it is a little messy, as I said. The trick is to set it to Magnifier. You can only have Magnifier set if you have more than one checkmark. It's going to give you a menu of things to choose from. But just one checkmark will immediately go to what you want. Now magnifier is unique in all of these in that Magnifier is actually an App. So, since it is an app I can go into Shortcuts here and then at the top level go to Automation. I can add a new Automation and I can set this automation to trigger when an app is launched. I'll choose the app here and I will find the Magnifier App. So when the Magnifier App is launched it will do something. Now I'm going to set it to run immediately and no notification there. I'll go to Next. Now when Magnifier is opened I'm going to have it trigger a shortcut. I'm going to have it trigger something like, say, the Calculator Shortcut I created. So when the Magnifier is opened it's going to run that Calculator shortcut which will open the Calculator App. So now I can Exit out of here. Now watch what happens when I triple press the side button. You're going to see the Magnifier open briefly and then it will immediately run the shortcut which opens the Calculator App. So that's what I mean by it's a little messy. Because you see the Magnifier kind of launch there. So if that's fine this is a good way to actually have a physical button, very similar to the Action Button. It just takes a triple press of the side button to activate any shortcut you want. 
Now you can also go in Accessibility to Touch and then turn on Assistive Touch. This will bring up this little Assistive Touch Button right here. If I tap it you can see it creates this little menu and I can do various things. This is an Accessibility feature. But you can customize how it works here. You can see Single Tap, Double Tap, and Long Press can all be customized. So you can set a single tap to do a variety of different things including run a Shortcut. So I can do, say, Calculator like that. Or maybe it might make more sense to say Flashlight. Now I've got this button here I can move around on the screen and when I just do a quick short tap of it, it turns on the Flashlight or toggles it Off. I can customize that to run any shortcut that I want. I can also setup an Action for Double Tap and for Long Press and I can just move this around as I need to get out of the way. 
I'm going to show you one last one, only because some other people are talking about it. That's to create a special shortcut that will take one of the volume buttons and allow you to use that to trigger an action. Now there are a lot of things I don't like about doing this. So I'm not going to spend too much time on it. A lot of the examples I've seen of this are extremely complex and they don't need to be. Let's go into the Shortcuts App here and I'm going to go to Shortcuts. Then I've created a shortcut here called Volume Up Action. That will turn your volume up button into something else that will trigger a shortcut. The way it works is it is going to start off by looking for input. Now when you first run this shortcut there's going to be no input. So, then it is going to get the current volume and store that in a variable called, Current Volume. Then it is going to look to see if the shortcut input has any value. If it doesn't because you've just run it then it is not going to perform anything in this IF statement here. Instead it is going to skip all the way to the end and it's just going to simply run itself, so loop in other words, and you can see here it is going to send the current volume value as an input parameter for the next time through the loop. So the next time through the loop it will go through this IF statement and shortcut input does have a value. 
It's then going to check and see if the current volume is different than the previous value. In other words the volume has changed. Greater than means it has changed and it is now higher. In other words you've pressed the volume up button. If it has then it is going to run the shortcut calculator and you actually, you know, tap this and select a different shortcut if you want. So you can easily change which shortcut you're running right here in this one step. Then it is going to go and set the volume back to its previous amount. So if you've moved the volume up it will recognize it did. It will trigger this shortcut here and then will set it back down. In other words making the Up volume button not have that effect. Otherwise doing this will not only trigger this but also raise the volume and will only work until the volume gets to 100% and then stop working since it can't go any higher. Then it is going to, since the volume has changed, it's going to change the value of current volume so that when it is all done it sends that new value into the loop. So the next time it won't trigger again until you use the volume up button another time. 
Now since this is looping constantly I set it to simply wait a second at the end so it's only checking once a second instead of as fast as it can over and over again. I would think that would do a little bit better with battery life and taking over the processor time of your iPhone. There's a lot of things not to like about this in that it's got to always be running. So you have to start it like this and you can see it is just going to keep running. Now normally if I would do volume up it would launch Calculator App because I'm recording the screen the volume buttons don't actually change the volume. So you have to trust me that it actually does work but this has got to keep running and if you stop it, it won't do anything any more. So, I don't think it is a good idea to have a shortcut always running like that just looking for the volume to change. However, it could be useful in situations where you want to trigger something over a very short period of time. In other words you're setting your iPhone into a certain mode where you can easily turn the flashlight on and off and then when you're done doing whatever it is you're doing you simply stop the shortcut from running. So the general idea could still be useful. What I've created here is a very succinct version of this. I've seen others that are extremely complex with lots of menus and options and things like that. But this gives you the general idea if you really want to go this route. 
So there are a whole bunch of different alternatives to an Action Button if you don't happen to have one on your iPhone. I think probably the Back Tap solution is the best one. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “Alternatives To the iPhone Action Button”

Jim Terrinoni

5 months ago

Good job. Clear, concise and complete.

Sheldon

Thanks bunches

Kathy

Hi Gary, wonderful as always, thank you. Is it possible to use the back tap feature while the phone is locked? I've tried a number of things unsuccessfully. Not a big deal to open the phone 1st but I was curious. Also with my already saved Shortcuts, In trying to alter the icon & then saving it to home screen, the icon was still the previous one the home screen. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I ended up saving a picture & that works ok too, again, just curious. Thanks so very much.

Gary Rosenzweig

Kathy: I don't think so, because just about anything you need to do with it would require the phone to be unlocked. It would be a major security issue if you could set it up to do things while it was locked. It would create all sorts of security holes.

Hi Gary, that makes sense. Any thoughts about my inability to change the icon & have that reflected on the Home Screen? Thanks Gary, Kathy

Kathy: When you add it to the Home Screen there's a point in that process where you can set the icon.

Alternatives To the iPhone Action Button

Comments: 6 Responses to “Alternatives To the iPhone Action Button”

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