How to Get Started With Control Center in IOS 11
For iOS 11, Apple has completely redesigned the Control Center. The Control Center is a tray that pops up when you swipe up from the bottom of the display on your iPhone or iPad (on iPhone X, it pops up from the top right of the screen). Traditionally, it offers quick access to things like your phone’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth controls, airplane mode, flashlight, and music controls. Basically, it’s a place for shortcuts to various phone controls, and with iOS 11 it’s gotten a lot smarter.
A New Look
The first time you swipe up on iOS 11, you’re likely to be caught off guard a bit. Instead of a small set of controls at the bottom of the page, the new Control Center is an entire page that looks much more user-friendly than it did in the past.
With the new design, everything is on the same page, so you don’t have to scroll to get to what you’re looking for. It also means finding things can be a little tricky. All the icons in the Control Center are similar to them. Therefore, if you are trying to find something quickly, it may take you a few seconds longer than the old version.
However, once you get used to where everything is, finding an icon on one page becomes much easier than it used to be when you had to slide your finger across the screen.
While the basic controls you see are pretty simple, clicking on each icon brings up a larger menu for that feature. For example, clicking on the brightness slider will open it into a full screen control where you can adjust the screen brightness or turn on Night Shift.
Tapping on the music controls brings up a larger music menu where you can do things like switch music from playing on your phone’s internal speakers to Bluetooth headphones.
By and large, it seems like you are now getting a lot more from the Control Center using a lot less space.
Add your things
The highlight of the Control Center in iOS 11 for me is the new ability to add my own data to it. You can’t add shortcuts to apps, which is pretty frustrating, but you can add shortcuts to a number of phone functions that you might need quick access to.
To do this, go to the Settings menu on your phone and then to the Control Center. From the Control Center menu, choose Customize Controls, and then choose what you want to add to the Control Center page. Here are some options:
- Anxiety
- Low power mode
- Screen Recording
- Stopwatch
- Apple TV Remote
- Wallet
- Voice Notes
- Magnifier
- Flashlight
- Do not disturb while driving
The menu divides all the options into what is in your Control Center and what is not, so you can organize things as you see fit.
Do you need all these shortcuts? Absolutely not. This is why they are shipped as optional features rather than preconfigured in the Control Center. Customization isn’t exactly what Apple was known for.
Smart flight mode
Small tweak, but good: now when you turn on Airplane mode on your iPhone or iPad, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are not automatically turned off. If you’ve ever tried listening to music with Bluetooth headphones on an airplane, or logging into Wi-Fi in flight, then you’ve probably been annoyed that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi turned off automatically when you followed the directions and put your phone into airplane mode ( which may or may not lead you to end up “accidentally” forgetting to turn on airplane mode to begin with).
I am personally very happy about this. This is a tiny thing, but it will greatly affect me. The Next Web reports that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth don’t actually turn off at all in iOS 11 when you use Control Center, a move designed to ensure you can still use features like AirDrop and stay connected. with your Apple Watch. To disable them now, you need to go completely to the settings menu. This is very annoying.
Takes some getting used to
I’ve only been using the new Control Center for a few days. The changes definitely take some getting used to, but they seem like changes that over time will be a significant improvement over previous versions.