Transcription
What's up, guys? My name's Brandon, and if you don't want to watch a two-hour video on all of the new iOS 26 features, but you also don't want to see a bunch of features that you already know about, you've come to the right spot because in this video, I'm going to be showing you more than 30 of the best hidden features in iOS 26.
Okay, so this first one is one of my favorites in iOS 26, and it's absolutely one that Apple did not mention anywhere, and that is the fact that you can now swipe to go back from anywhere on the screen. So before in iOS 18 and every previous version of iOS, if you wanted to go back without tapping on, you know, the back arrows, you had to swipe from the side of the screen. You had to go all the way to the edge of the screen and swipe over. But now with iOS 26, you could do it from anywhere, not just the edge. So if I want to use my phone one-handed, I could swipe over from the middle or from right here, anywhere on the screen aside from the edge to go back. So that's something it might seem small, but trust me, it is a big quality of life change when you use your phone a lot throughout the day.
Okay. So let's say you get a missed call from somebody, but you're too busy at the moment to call them back. Well, now with iOS 26, you could simply swipe over on that missed call and we have a new kind of hidden option there for scheduling a call back. So now if you tap on that, you can set a call back reminder to remind yourself to call that person back in an hour, tonight, tomorrow, or at a custom date.
Now here is a really cool hidden feature in the photos application in iOS 26. So if you take a photo or a video at a concert and then you go into that and you swipe up, it will now show you specifics about that concert. So it will not only recognize that you're at a concert, but it will recognize exactly what concert you were at because if you tap on that, it will show it as a past event. It will show the exact date and time. It will show the details, a map of the venue along with Apple Music songs from that artist. And we can even go to another concert down here. And you can see that it will change based on the act. So it shows it right there. I could tap on that and it will show me the details of that past event. And you'll also notice that the thumbnails are now more relevant in search results. So for the concerts, it always shows the, you know, main scene for the thumbnail when I'm searching for it.
Now, here's a really cool kind of hidden feature for customizing your device. If you press and hold on your home screen and you go up to edit and then go to customize, if you go over to tinted, we have two brand new options that are very overlooked by most people. So, this right here will allow you to match your icons to the color of your phone. So, I tapped on that and you can see that I have the gold phone. So, it's doing its best to match the color with these icons. Now, also to the right of that, we have another icon that is to match the color of your phone case. So, if you have an Apple, you know, first-party case, it will be able to detect the color of that case. And then you can customize and kind of match your icons to that case color. And you can also tap on this right here to change the color based on the wallpaper or you could choose a custom color, you know, based on your wallpaper there.
In the messages application, if somebody sends you a text and you want to copy that text, before you had to press and hold on it and then just simply press copy and it would copy everything in that entire message. But if you don't want to copy every single thing in that message, maybe I only want to copy banana peel, I can now do that with iOS 26 by haptic pressing and then going to this new option here called select. And now with that, I can go up here and only select banana peel to have that copied.
Now, here's a feature I love. So, let me set the stage here. So, say you're in bed and you're ordering something online, but your wallet is out in the kitchen. You don't want to get up. You don't want to go to the kitchen, but you also don't have access to your card number, so you have to get up and go. Well, now with iOS 26, you don't have to do that because you can now store your physical card details in the Apple Wallet application. All you have to do is go into the wallet app and then go into your credit card that you want to store, which this one is the MX for example. I could tap on this little icon up top. Let's go into that and put in our Face ID. You will see a button that says add card information. Then you can scan your card or insert it manually and then you will be able to see your card number, your expiration date, your security code and a description for that card all right there in the wallet application.
Another lesser known feature in the wallet application has to do with the Apple card. So if you go into a transaction in your Apple card, we now have a brand new option for changing the category of that purchase. So by default, Apple will use machine learning and you know just basic logic to determine what category that purchase belongs to. Shopping, travel, entertainment and so on. But if they get it wrong, you can now manually override that and change it for that specific transaction. Or you can select multiple transactions to change that.
Now, if you're somebody who likes to have custom ringtones on your iPhone, before you always had to go into GarageBand and it was a whole charade to add a custom ringtone to your device. But now with iOS 26, it's the easiest it's ever been. And this was very hidden and before people started talking about it online. So basically, if you go into your files application and then haptic press on one of your files, your MP3 file that's less than 30 seconds, and then we go into share right here, you can see it might not show up at first, but if you tap on more right there, we get a brand new option for use as ringtone. And now when you tap on that, it will allow you to set that as a custom ringtone if it is under 30 seconds.
Now, here's a really interesting one that you might not use very often, but it's a nice hidden feature that Apple did not talk about. So, if you go into your settings and go to general and then into about and you scroll down until you get to your IMEI number, instead of having to copy that and send it to somebody or just read out all those numbers, you can now haptic press on that and we have a brand new option for barcode. You can also share device identifiers. You could do it that way. But barcode's pretty cool because now when you tap on that, it will have an IMEI barcode that somebody at a store like an Apple store or a carrier store, they can scan that and get your IMEI that way. And if you select share device identifiers from that screen, this allows you to share your EID and both IMEI numbers right here by scanning the barcodes all in one. Or you could use reader to share and you can just tap on it to share that information.
If you take a screenshot in iOS 26 and then you go to markup right here and then you tap on the plus in the bottom right hand corner, you can see that the magnifier has returned. So the loop right there, if you tap on that, this is the magnifier that you could add for your screenshots to magnify something if you want somebody to notice it. So if I want somebody to notice the passwords app, I can do that. And that is now saved and makes my screenshot look a lot better.
iOS 26 now adds voice isolation for audio recordings and not just for phone calls. So, when you're recording something, you could swipe up on the control center and tap right here. And you might be able to change that to voice isolation. At least you have the option to do that now. And then also, when you're done with the recording, you can now tap on these three dots right there. And we have a new option called studio voice. If you tap on that, that will modify your recording to block out background sounds and make you sound more professional like you're in a studio. And if you tap right here, you will be able to go to this section. And you can see you can adjust the studio voice as well. So you could adjust the intensity of that studio type effect.
iOS 26 adds a nice change to the always on display. So if you have an always on display compatible device, if you lock your screen, you can see that before if you had your wallpaper showing, it would just show your full wallpaper as intended. However, there's a new option to make that a little bit better in my opinion with iOS 26. So, if you go into your settings and you go down to display and brightness and then scroll down until you get to always on display, we have a brand new toggle that is off by default called blur wallpaper photo. That's a brand new kind of hidden feature here. So, now when you go ahead and lock your device, you can see that it will blur that background wallpaper. So, it's a little bit less distracting and you can see your notifications and your clock a little bit better.
Now, something else that you might not even notice in iOS 26 or it might just happen without you realizing it is that search in messages is so much better. Now in iOS 26 because you can use natural language to search for specific messages. So basically if you type in something and it's maybe not exactly what was said in the conversation, it will now show it up in the search results because it's relevant and it's similar enough and now iOS 26 can understand that. And also something else a lot of people don't realize is if you go into the emoji picker right here and you tap on the Gin emoji icon. We've known that we can create Jin emojis for a while but they've never really been that great and a lot of people just don't use it. However, now with iOS 26 that might be changing because we can now do mix emoji where we can combine different emojis without having to describe them with words. So, if we combine these two emoji right here, it will give us what's called a mix emoji. And you can tap on that and go through different variations of that mix emoji. Now, you can take this even further as well by adding in a person. So, if I tap right here and I choose myself, if you tap in the bottom left, it will show you what you will look like as a Jen emoji or a mi emoji. You can see that right there. So, we're just going to tap on this one and tap on the check mark. And now, that will add that into the mix and create another custom emoji. And you can see what that looks like right there. And now I can go ahead and save this and add this into my chats and it will save and send as a regular emoji as you could see right there.
Now, if you've ever been in the photos application and you take a photo straight from within the messages app and you send that in that message, you would know that before it didn't actually save that image to your camera roll. It was only, you know, meant to be sent in that group chat or in that text message thread, but it was not actually saved to your camera roll. However, there's a hidden setting, a kind of hidden feature in iOS 26 that changes that. So, if you go into your settings, go to camera, go all the way to the bottom, we have a brand new option here under messages that says save captures to photo library. And what this does is it will automatically save captures taken in messages and messages camera to the photo library. So, if you don't want to save those, you can turn that off. That way, they only stay in that chat thread. But, if you want them to save to your camera roll as well, you can turn that on. And speaking of the camera, I wouldn't really call this one hidden, but it's kind of overlooked by a lot of people. If we go into our settings right here, we also have lens cleaning hints. And what this does is it will display an alert in your camera application when it detects that you might have smudging or something interfering with the camera lens on your iPhone that results in more poor camera quality. So, make sure you have that turned on so you're notified when you have an issue with your lens.
Okay, so here's my favorite hidden feature in the music application in iOS 26. So, first off, with iOS 26, you can pin items now to the top. You can tap on these three dots and edit those pins right there. Would highly recommend doing that for the songs and playlists that you listen to the most. However, the hidden feature here is actually when you press and hold on one of these pinned items, we now have a brand new option for tap action. And when you tap on this, this will allow you to change what actually happens when you tap on that pinned item. So if you want it to just simply play that playlist for example, you can do that. Or if you want it to shuffle the playlist, you could do that from there as well. Or the default is to just simply go to that playlist. So I can tap on it and it will take me into the playlist and I can choose what I want to play from there. However, if I change this, go to go to action and we go to shuffle for example, you can see it gives it a new glyph icon. And if we tap on that, it will automatically start shuffling that playlist without actually going into the playlist itself. So, it's easier to get it started.
In the podcast application, you know how you have the playback speed down here? Before you just had to tap on it and choose your playback speed, but now we have a new interface here and it's kind of hidden here that you can change the speed by simply tapping and holding and dragging. And you also get haptic feedback with that. Now, you could also do this from this page by simply swiping up or swiping down. So, this is kind of a hidden gesture here in podcast and you can feel the haptic feedback there as well. And you can do this without pulling up the full interface. And also once you have your settings dialed in and you have enhanced dialogue turned on, whatever you want, you can now save that as a custom setting for that show. So if it doesn't pop up down here, you can actually go to the show itself, tap on the three dots, go to settings, and then all the way down here at the bottom. Now we have a brand new section that's really hidden in the settings called speed and audio adjustment. You can use custom adjustments for this specific show. So you can change the playback speed, you can have advanced dialogue turned on, and now for every episode, it will abide by those custom settings.
And speaking of music and podcast, we also now have a nice new setting inside of our settings. And if we go into general, and then down here to AirPlay and continuity, we have a brand new toggle that's hidden inside the settings called keep audio with headphones. So, what this does is if you have your AirPods in or your headphones in and then you go into a place like a car or into a house with speakers and your device connects via Bluetooth automatically to those other devices, if you have this turned on, the audio will stay in your headphones and not automatically switch to the other devices.
And speaking of the car, if you're somebody who gets car sick, you probably love the accessibility feature right here under motion called vehicle motion cues. This was introduced last year. However, there's a new kind of hidden section here inside of our settings for this where you can customize the appearance. So, if we turn this on, by default, before it was just all these black dots. However, you can now customize the appearance to have larger dots, to have more dots. You could change the color of the dots, and you can also change the pattern to make it regular or dynamic.
And if you're somebody like me who loves background sounds, if you go ahead and haptic press right here on the ear in the control center, you go into your background sounds, we have a new timer up top now where you can stop these background sounds at a certain time. Now, you cannot change that from this section, but I'll show you in a minute. We do also have some new background sounds right there. But if you go down to the bottom and go to background sounds settings, it will take you into your background sounds right here. And you can change the volume. You have use when media is playing. But more importantly down here we have the equalizer where you can change the tone and the balance or the audio that's coming out. And then also we have stop sounds with a timer. So you can now set to turn off background sounds at a specific time. You can also have those settings remembered for future times that you turn on background sounds. And you also have the ability to stop your background sounds when you lock your phone.
Now Apple talked about customizing folders in Finder on the Mac, but they never really talked about it in the files application on iOS. And I actually think it's pretty useful for organizing. So if we go into a folder right here, we now have the option to customize folder and tags. And when you do that, we have this option here for tags. When you tap on that, you can choose what color you want that folder to be. So if we go to purple, for example, we go to the plus right here, it will change that entire folder to a purple color. And you could also go into here and add an emoji to that folder to make it stand out even more.
Now also if you go into a file in the files application, if you haptic press on it right there and we go to open with, we now have a new option to automatically open a file with quick look, which is like a preview. So you could always do quick look before, but it was never the default. It was never an option for the default. So now you can see instead of opening it up in pages, I can have it automatically default just open up in a quick view. There we go. Now it opens up like that instead of in the pages app.
Now here's a nice hidden feature. So, if you go into the messages application, you will now see when a contact is blocked. So, you can see the little red blocked button next to Bianca right there. And if I tap and go into that conversation, when you have a contact blocked, you can now no longer see the text field where you can type. You don't even get the option to type until you unblock that contact. And if you're curious about everybody you have blocked, you can actually now see that in one section in iOS 26. So, if you go into your settings and then we go down here to privacy and security and then we scroll down, you will see right here that we have blocked contacts. And now when you go into that, it will show all of your blocked contacts in one specific section. You can even add a blocked contact from here as well.
Now, here's another really useful kind of overlooked feature in iOS 26 when it comes to the phone application. So, when you go to a contact right here, you will see that if we scroll down, we now have call history. So you can now see the call history for a specific contact. When you pull that up, it will show you every time you called them outgoing or they called you as incoming. It will show the exact date and time for every time you guys contacted each other.
So a new feature in iOS 26 with the music application is the ability to translate lyrics. So now if you're listening to something in another language, it can now translate those lyrics. And it can also now show pronunciation. So, if an artist is saying something that might be hard to pronounce or they're pronouncing it in a different, you know, less conventional way, you could show the punctuation as well. However, there's also the option to show both. And there's also a setting to pick which one you want to be larger. So, if you go into your music settings and go down to lyrics, we have larger text. And you can now choose if you want the lyrics or the pronunciation to be larger when you're in this view if both exist at the same time.
Now, I don't know about you guys, but I use the passwords app on the iPhone and on the Mac all the time. And there's a nice new kind of hidden feature here in iOS 26 in this application. So, if you go into a password that you have saved, there's now a new option here for view history. And when you tap on that, it will now show you the history of the different passwords you used over time.
And the final one is kind of a hidden gesture in the Safari application with the new compact tab bar down at the bottom. So, as you know, if you tap on the three dots and you go to all tabs, that's how you can view all of your tabs. Another way to get to that is to just swipe up from right here. So, you can swipe up from the address bar to get to this view. However, the hidden gesture here is doubletapping on the three dots at the bottom. So, now if we double tap on that really quickly, it will open up our tab view like so. That has actually been my preferred way to get to my tab view. It's sometimes even quicker than swiping up right there because my thumb just kind of sits there and I can double tap and go into this page. Oh, and something else that's kind of hidden in here is if you haptic press on a tab that's currently opened, we now have the option to duplicate that tab. And when you duplicate it, it opens it up right there and it keeps you in the tab view look. And the last thing I'll show you here in Safari is in the tab view. If you tap on the three dots up top, we now have the option to arrange our tabs by title and by website. So, if I go by title, for example, it's going to put everything in alphabetical order. So, if I go up to the top, you could see it will be emojis first and then it will be the A's at the beginning.
So, there you have it. Those are more than 30 hidden features in iOS 26. Now, I understand that not all of these are going to be hidden to everybody. You might have a better understanding of the software. You may have watched all my videos, but to a lot of people, these are going to be features that are not as well-known and are not as widely covered. So, hope you understand. And I hope you had learned at least one new thing from this video. That is the goal after all. And if you did, I would appreciate if you gave it a thumbs up. If you want to get your hands on this wallpaper or this wallpaper or any of the wallpapers from my Lustra wallpaper pack, it will be down in the description below. It was built for liquid glass. But anyways, hope you guys enjoyed. I will see you guys very