The Best IOS 13 Tricks You Haven’t Tried Yet
I’ve been experimenting with iOS 13 ever since the developer beta first went live – bugs and all. Since it’s now publicly available , I thought I’d share a few of my favorite new tricks so you can be thrilled while you wait for the beta to install on your device.
Switch Wi-Fi networks without using settings
For those who need a little more manual control over the Wi-Fi networks they connect to, I’m happy to report that you’ll never again have to open the Settings app – hopefully – to connect to a Wi-Fi network. Instead, open your device’s Control Center .
Press and hold the Wi-Fi icon to expand the view, for example:
Press and hold the Wi-Fi icon again to open a list of all Wi-Fi networks detected by your device. Select the one you want to use.
Remove apps you no longer need (before updating them)
I have a lot of apps installed on my device and I often forget about them, but I keep updating them all the time because this is how the process works. You might think that seeing a giant app update that I haven’t touched in six months would prompt me to uninstall it, but then I would have to look for it on my device, which also takes too long.
To address this issue, Apple is making it much easier to uninstall apps in iOS 13. Now when you see a pending app update in the App Store (or have downloaded and installed it), swipe left on the app. You will see the familiar red Uninstall button that you can click to uninstall the app from your iPhone or iPad. Never again will you have to waste precious minutes searching and deleting applications in folders.
Tell Siri to add multiple items to lists
It’s fun. Fire up Siri and tell her to add items to the list, but make sure you use the word “and” to put them all together. When you do that, iOS 13 will split each item into a separate list instead of concatenating them into one reminder, like this:
Share your estimated arrival time with your friends
Now you can share your estimated arrival time with friends when you use Apple Maps to get somewhere – a particularly useful feature if you’re also connected to CarPlay. Your device will automatically send them your current travel time and also send them another message when you are really close so they can go outside and get in the car instead of making you buzz or send “where are you?” text.
If you always want certain people to know your estimated time of arrival at a certain place – say, when you drive home from work every day – add it to your list of favorite places on Apple Maps. From the Details screen, you can tap Add Person under Share ETA to automatically notify them whenever you take a route to that location.
Finally, a great way to stop robot calls
I’ve saved the best for last, and it truly is one of the greatest and simplest features to ever come to iOS. With one small addition to your Settings app (technically, it’s the Phone option in your Settings app), Apple has killed the robot calls, or at least made it impossible to chase them. And this is a much better solution than paying your carrier for some kind of spam blocking feature.
Open the Settings app and tap Phone. Find the section “Mute calls and blocked contacts” and enable “Mute unknown callers”. Any number that is not in your contacts, mail or messages will not ring and display on your device. Instead, it will go straight to voicemail.
While this creates problems in cases where you want to receive a phone call from an unknown number – say, from a hospital, or in an interview, etc. – you can always temporarily disable this feature if you know you are expecting a call. It’s much less annoying than the alternative of having your phone ring four times an hour from some spammer.
What are your favorite iOS 13 features?
There’s a lot more to iOS 13 to enjoy, such as the ability to remove any location information from photos you share with others (via the Options setting when you click an image in Photos and then click the Share “). Which of your favorite features have you discovered? Let me know in the comments and I’ll highlight the best ones in a future post.