How To Make Text Larger In Individual Apps On an iPhone

If you have trouble reading text in some iPhone apps but not others, you can customize the text size in many apps on an individual app-by-app basis. You can do this in the Settings app or using Control Center.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can make text bigger in individual apps on your iPhone. 
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Now people often have trouble reading text in apps on the iPhone. After all it is a pretty small screen. The device needs to fit in your pocket. Different apps present text in different ways. Some of them have larger fonts. Some smaller. Some are more readable than others. Of course there is the individual experience of how good your eyes are, whether you use reading glasses and such. If there is an app that is giving you particular trouble you can usually adjust the text size. But it is not a setting in the app. It's actually a system setting on the iPhone. You can customize the size of text throughout the iPhone but also for individual apps. Now not all apps are going to follow this. Some apps, particularly games, may have text that is sized to fit inside the interface in a specific way. But a lot of apps, like social media apps, allow you to adjust the size. This could make a big difference when using that app. 
I do want to point out here that I'm using an early version of iOS 17 for this. But this works the same in iOS 16 and even iOS 15. 
So as an example here let's go and use the Reminders App. You could see here the size of the text. Let's say you want to make that bigger, just for the Reminders App. One way to do that is to go into Settings. Then in Settings go to Accessibility and from there under Vision go to Display & Text Size. Now here's where you can set larger text and change the default text size for text on your iPhone. But what we want to do is to change it for just one app. So, go back out to the top level of Accessibility. Actually scroll to the very bottom. Here you're going to see Per App Settings. Go into that. Now you're going to see Add App. You may also see some other apps here if you've already customized some settings. Let's add an app and then we're going to choose from the list here. 
I'm going to go down to Reminders and add that right there. Now that I've added Reminders I can select it and go in. Now I can go to Larger Text and in here I can increase the text size for Reminders. It will give you an example here at the top. Now I can go back. Notice I can change a bunch of other things here as well. For instance, I can change whether or not text is Bolded which also may make it easier to read. I can increase Contrast and do various other things that may make it easier to read text. But for now I'm just going to stick to making text larger. Now I want to go back to the Home Screen and then go to Reminders and you can see there the text is much larger and easier to read. 
Now there is another way to do this. If you go into Settings and then you go to Control Center I want you to look through the list and look for Text Size. Make sure that instead of it being down here under More Controls that it is actually added to the Top so it is in Included Controls. You can see it right there. Now that I've got it there I can go into an app, like Reminders, and once I'm there I can bring up Control Center. How you do that depends on which model of iPhone you've got. But most recent iPhones allow you to bring up Control Center by swiping down from the top right corner like that. Then you'll see here the Text Controls. Now you can go in and Resize the text right here. 
Before you do that notice in the bottom where you've got just the App that you are Currently  Using, or All Apps. Make sure that is set right. So in this case I've got it set to just Reminders App, which is what I want. If I add it over here then it is going to change the default size. So let's just do it for Reminders. I'm going to set the text size to something like that. Now when I tap to Dismiss it, tap again to Dismiss Control Center, it has changed the size of this one app. So it is easy to do that in other apps as well. Here I'll go into Notes. Let's say I want to change the default size for Notes. I'll go into the text settings there. I'll go and make sure it is just for Notes. Then I'm going to increase it a little bit. Dismiss this and notice it doesn't change right away. But as soon as I tap in the app then it changes. 
If you change the size using Control Center it's actually changing the same setting. So if I go to the Settings App now and to Accessibility and then to the bottom to Per App Settings you can see Notes now has an entry there and I can select it and see that, indeed, the text size has been set larger. The advantage of doing it in Settings, of course, is that you get access to all these other options, not just the size of the text. The advantage of doing it in Control Center is that you can do it quickly and easily without leaving the app. Of course you can set the default size in both Settings, Accessibility like I showed before and also in Control Center. So if you find the text is too small in pretty much all apps you can set your Default to something bigger. If that makes some text look really bad because of how text wraps, or something, then you can always set a custom setting for that app to make it 100% or whatever you want. 
Note you can even do this for the Home Screen. So here's the normal Home Screen. But if I were to go bring up the Control Center, change the text size and say Home Screen Only, I can make the text much larger and then the Home Screen text label is now underneath the icons, for instance, are bigger and easier to read. As an example of a place where this works really well is in social media apps. So here, for instance, is threads using the default size and here is it with a larger size. You can see it is easier to read and it would be the same in different social media apps as well. 
So try it with whatever app you have where you find it difficult to read text. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Make Text Larger In Individual Apps On an iPhone”

Dave Taenzer

2 years ago

I have been doing this for years with the Control Center but did not know about the Accessibility settings. Thanks.

Old Mac guy

Looks helpful. Thank you.

Sue

Great video as always. Did not know you can make things Bold as well. Love the topics on the basics for the older generation not fluent in electronics. Keep them coming. Thank you.

Blind Fencer

I just found your website and videos. Thanks for this video!!

Robert Bailey

Both great options, as there are only a few apps I use where the size is too small, and changing all sizes under Display & Text size makes some text too large (for example,in Settings)

paul benchwick

9 months ago

Great explanation about text but I wanted to reduce the size of the reminders icon which all of a sudden became quite large as did the calendar icon which I did not touch. It just happened and i cannot find help to get it back to the original smaller size
Gracias!!

Gary Rosenzweig

Paul: All of the icons on your iPhone's Home Screen should be the same size. Perhaps you added a widget for Reminders and a widget for Calendar? Widgets are larger, but they are not icons. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwh6qOTn8LM

Comments Closed.

How To Make Text Larger In Individual Apps On an iPhone

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Make Text Larger In Individual Apps On an iPhone”

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