Change These 11+ Hidden Settings to Personalize Your New iPhone!

Pick a New Siri Voice

Apple's added a few different Siri voices you can change to your liking! You can try different voices and choose the one you like best just with a few taps like this:

1. Open Settings.
2. Tap on Siri & Search.
3. Select Siri Voice.
4. Tap on the Variety you want to use.
5. Tap each nationality to hear what Siri would sound like. 
6. Choose the Voice you want for Siri.

You can play around with Siri's voices as much as you want. And if you want to use the classic voice, remember to choose the American variety and select Voice 4.

Add an Extra Button to Your iPhone (or Two)

Apple introduced a feature called Back Tap, and it's gaming-changing. With this feature, you can add an extra button or two to the back of your iPhone.

When Back Tap is enabled, you can tap twice or three times on the back of your iPhone to do an action like opening your Camera or the Notification Center. Think of it as a cool extra shortcut. 

1. Open Settings.
2. Scroll down and select Accessibility.
3. Tap on Touch.
4. Scroll to the bottom and select Back Tap.
5. Tap on Double Tap or Triple Tap.
6. Select the action you want your iPhone to do.

Add New Buttons to the Control Center

Control Center is a useful feature that lets you have many tools—or controls— available with just one swipe. What's great is that you can customize your Control Center to only show your favorite apps and controls in one place. All you need to do is follow these steps:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap on Control Center.
3. At the top, you'll see all your controls currently on your Control Center. At the bottom, you'll see all the controls you can add. 
4. Tap the minus icon on a control to remove it and the plus icon to add it to your control center.
5. You can also drag each control from the right side to move it up or down the list. 

Keep in mind that the controls you have available will sometimes depend on your installed Apple apps. For instance, you might not find the Voice Memos control if you haven't downloaded the app yet.

Make Your iPhone's Text Bigger

There's no shame in admitting that most of us need to make the text on our iPhones bigger. We don't want to wear glasses all the time, especially when we're just relaxing with our phones. Fortunately, Apple makes it easy to make the text on your screen bigger just by following these steps:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Scroll down and tap on Display & Brightness.
3. Tap on Text Size.
4. Use the slider to choose the right text size for you.

Schedule Your Notification Summary

Apple introduced the notification summary feature with iOS 15 as a way to receive all your notifications at specific times of the day – that way, you won't get bothered with unnecessary notifications when you're working, and you'll be able to catch up with a neat summary. 

Here's how you can start using notification summary on your iPhone:

1. Tap on Settings.
2. Select Notifications.
3. Tap on Schedule Summary.
4. Toggle Schedule Summary on.
5. You can then choose the schedules when you want to receive notifications. 
6. You can also customize the apps you want to receive notifications from. 

Keep in mind that notification summary doesn't affect time-sensitive notifications. You'll still receive those right away.

Set Up Focus Modes

A fairly new feature your iPhone has is called Focus. This feature works like Do Not Disturb, but you can create different Focus modes for every aspect of your life, including going to the gym, sleeping, and working. 

In order to use Focus, you'll need to update your iPhone to iOS 15 or newer. Then, all you need to do is follow these steps:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap on Focus.
3. Tap the plus icon in the top right to create a new focus.
4. Create a custom focus, or use one of Apple's default modes. 
5. Follow the instructions on your iPhone. 

After you're done, you can further customize your focus by adding specific Home screens or apps you want to use only during that Focus. 

You can use that Focus mode whenever you want by opening the Control Center and tapping the Do Not Disturb button. Then you can choose which Focus you want to use. 

Disable Location Services for Apps That Don't Need Them

Location Services is an iPhone feature that apps can use to know your exact location. A lot of apps will ask you for your location to give you a better service, but the truth is that not all apps need it.

The good news is you can disable Location Services so certain apps can't track your location.

1. Open Settings.
2. Scroll down and tap on Privacy.
3. Select Location Services.
4. Select each app and allow or deny Location Services permissions individually.

Disable Background App Refresh to Save Battery

Background App Refresh lets apps run in the background in order to fetch content for you. That way, you'll get the most recent content as soon as it's available.

Even though this sounds cool, not every app needs to use this feature. Plus, managing Background App Refresh will help you improve your battery life.

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Scroll down and tap on General.
3. Select Background App Refresh.
4. Tap on Background App Refresh.
5. Select Off.

This will disable Background App Refresh completely, but you can also disable this feature for each individual app to customize it however you want.

Stop Sharing Data with Apple

Apple asks to share daily diagnostics and usage data to improve its products and services with every software update. But the truth is, a trillion-dollar company can improve its devices just fine without your data, so it'd be best if you stopped sharing this information. Here's how to do it:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Scroll down and select Privacy.
3. Scroll down to the bottom and tap on Analytics & Improvements.
4. Toggle Share iPhone & Watch Analytics off.

And that's it, if you feel like sharing your data with Apple again, all you need to do is follow the same steps. 

Join the Dark (Mode) Side

It's 2022, and if you're still not using Dark mode on iPhone, now is a great time to start. Not only can Dark mode help you preserve battery life—and not burn your retinas at night— but it also makes your iPhone look way cooler. 

Here's how to enable Dark mode:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Scroll down and tap on Display & Brightness.
3. Under Appearance, tap on Dark. 

Pretty easy, right? If you only want to use Dark mode at a specific time, you can toggle Automatic on so your iPhone switches from Light to Dark at a specific schedule. 

Add Even More Privacy

Apple wants to use your iPhone activity to show you personalized ads, which can be kind of scary. Fortunately, Apple is transparent about it, and it even lets you turn this feature off. All you need to do is follow these steps:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Scroll down and select Privacy.
3. Scroll down to the bottom and tap on Apple Advertising.
4. Toggle Personalized Ads off.

Since you're there already, you can also tap on View Ad Targeting information to learn more about how Apple shows you personalized ads.