The Best Hidden Feature Of iOS 14: Back Tap

Back Tap is a handy feature that allows you to set custom actions for when you tap on the back of your iPhone. You can set two actions, one for double and one for triple taps. You can choose from a list, or create your own actions in the Shortcuts app.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary at MacMost.com. Today let's look at the coolest hidden feature in 
iOS 14 for iPhone.
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So a great new feature of iOS 14 that works on most newer iPhones is called Back Tap. It allows you to do things when you simply tap on the back of your iPhone. To enable this go into Settings. Then from there scroll down to Accessibility. Then look for Touch and there at the bottom should be Back Tap. You go into that and you'll see there's two different settings. Double Tap and Triple Tap. Now you won't see this unless you have a compatible iPhone. All the iPhones that have Face ID should have this. So if you've got an iPhone 7 or 8 or even a brand new iPhone SE, second generation, it's not going to have this. If there's a Home button then you're not going to be able to use Back Tap. But if you have an iPhone 10 or 11 it should work and you should see this feature here. Now Double Tap and Triple Tap have the same options available. Basically you can have two different Back Taps functions. One when you hit the iPhone twice and another when you do it three times. So let's see what's possible.
Let's set a Double Tap, Back Tap command. So first you have None here at the top. If it's set to that, of course, nothing happens. That's the default. You can also have it set to the Accessibility Shortcut. This is usually what happens when you use three presses on the Side Button. For instance it might bring up the Magnifier. You could simply have Double Tap to be another way to bring up the Accessibility Shortcuts. To see your Accessibility Shortcut go back up to the Main level of Accessibility and Scroll down to the bottom. Here you'll see Accessibility Shortcut and you could see what that is set to. So whatever this is set to you can then Activate with a Back Tap as well. Now you can also set the Accessibility Shortcut to be more than one thing. So, for instance, let's add a few things here. Now when I use the Accessibility Shortcut I'm going to Triple press on the Side Button it actually comes up with a menu and allows me to choose which one I want. You can get the same thing with Back Tap. 
Now next we've got a whole bunch of different system options here. You could see the very first one is App Switcher. So let's turn that one on. Now if I use a Back Tap you could see it brings up the application Switcher. Now if I do it a second time it will dismiss the application switcher. A lot of these controls will toggle things On or Off or go back and forth between two modes. So by setting it to App Switcher it's either turning App Switcher on or if App Switcher is already on then dismiss it. You could also have it bring up the Control Center. You could see it brings it up. Doing it again will Dismiss it. You can have Back Tap act as another way to activate the Home Button. So instead of using the little line at the bottom of the screen, which is what you're going to have if you're using an iPhone with Face ID, you could use Back Tap to go Home. You can have your iPhone go to the Lock Screen. You could have Mute turned on or off. So here you could see I turned it Off. I had it on before and now I can turn it On again by using it a second time. You could bring up the Notification Center. You could activate Reachability which is the ability on larger iPhones to drop down all the controls so you could reach them if you're holding the Phone with one hand. A Back Tap will dismiss it as well.
The think a lot of people are using this for is to take a Screen Shot. I'm not a fan of this because you shouldn't be taking that many Screen Shots. But if it is something you do quite often then having a Back Tap set for this may be the way to go. You can have a Back Tap do the same thing as a shake which usually is used for Undo. So you can use this as an Undo command. You could bring up Siri with Back Tap. You could bring up Spotlight using Back Tap and it also Dismisses it. You can have Volume down and Volume up. Now it wouldn't make sense to just have one of those set to Volume down or Volume up but maybe you could have the DoubleTap set to down and the Triple Tap set to up you could use it as a volume control.
Now there are a bunch of accessibility commands you can use. These are some of the same things we saw before with the Accessibility Shortcut. So you can have it turn On or Off Assistive Touch. Turn on either Classic Invert or Smart Invert. Go to the Magnifier. Speak what's on the Screen turned On and Off. Voice over turned On and Off. Zoom. So you can see it brings up Zoom here so I can read what's on the screen and I can Dismiss it the same way. You could also use this for Scroll gestures. So you can have Scroll Down or Scroll Up. Or set the Double Tap to be Scroll Down and Triple Tap to be Scroll Up. I might make sense to just use Scroll Down if, for instance, you often end up at a webpage and you want to kind of keep reading and having it scroll down. Or if you're using the scrolling mode in the Books app.
That's not all. You can do anything you can do in the Shortcuts app. So here I've got all of my Shortcuts. These are things I created and I can set Back Tap to activate any new of these. So let's create a new shortcut and I'm going to just create a really simple one that will turn on Do Not Disturb. So I'm going to search for Do Not Disturb and use the Set Do Not Disturb control here and I'm going to have it turn Do Not Disturb on and off. Then I'm going to tap here and set a name for this. Hit Done. Now I don't even need to assign this to the Home screen or anything like that. I could just go now back into Settings and assign this to my Double Tap here. So now when I do Double Tap it turns on Do Not Disturb. I could also create a shortcut to launch any app. So let me add a new shortcut here and I'll search for Open App. Select that and then I could choose the app from the list here. So I could choose Notes there as the app to open. Then let's set a name for this and then I could use this Shortcut right here. Now when I Double Tap on the back it will open up Notes. So it could be really useful if there's an app that you really need to get to all the time you could set a quick shortcut so it's just a Double Tap or Triple Tap on the back will take you right into that app.
Now I have heard a few people complain that when they put their iPhone down on a surface it will activate the Double Tap. I could see how that would happen.You know you hit one edge first and then the other edge kind of hits after that. I've tried this a ton of times and I'm not able to get Double Tap to actually do anything. But if you have this problem I imagine the solution is to only use Triple Tap instead which will be much harder to mistakenly activate. If you're trying out Back Tap I'd love to hear what you're using it for. Which of the functions you find most useful or what type of shortcuts you're creating for it.

Comments: 10 Responses to “The Best Hidden Feature Of iOS 14: Back Tap”

Dana Stevens

5 years ago

Thanks Gary for the useful info. My second generation iPhone SE does seem to support Back Tap. I tried double and triple tap for control center and a couple of other options successfully.

Peter Emery

Not quite correct. Back Tap works on the iPhone 8 onwards, including the new SE. It certainly works on my 2020 SE.

Gary Rosenzweig

Peter: Interesting. Things must have changed since the original introduction of the feature during the betas.

Gary, I’m using double tap for screenshots and triple tap to open Halide Camera app. I use Halide to allow portrait mode pics on objects & pets, since the SE’s single lens can’t do the depth sensing natively.

Marc Chamberland

Sorry Gary, But I have an iPhone Se 2nd generation and I have the Back Tap With iOS 14

Marc: That's great. I heard that it only worked on phones with Face ID, and that's all I had to test on. Glad it works with other phones too.

Karl

Gary, is Mute on/off the same as using the side button Mute on/off?

Karl: Yes. If you try it you'll see it does exactly the same thing. (Silent Mode).

Ben

I have a connected central heating system that also has a couple of smart light bulbs. I had one of the bulbs switch on with a double tap, and off with a triple tap, which was kinda cool. However, I also find the double tap too easy to trigger accidentally, so I now only use the triple tap - and use it for Siri (Alexa controls my heating/lights anyway)

Mama Blair

I have an SE 2 and double tap works! I set it to open Control Center.

Comments Closed.

The Best Hidden Feature Of iOS 14: Back Tap

Comments: 10 Responses to “The Best Hidden Feature Of iOS 14: Back Tap”

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