About the Outline

iPhone: The Missing Manual is divided into five parts:

• Part I, covers everything related to phone calls: dialing, answering, voice control, voicemail, conference calling, text messaging, iMessages, MMS, and the Contacts (address book) program. It’s also where you can read about FaceTime, the iPhone’s video-calling feature; Siri, the voice-operated “virtual assistant”; and the surprisingly rich array of features for people with disabilities—some of which are useful even for people without them.

• Part II, is dedicated to the iPhone’s built-in software, with a special emphasis on its multimedia abilities: playing music, podcasts, movies, and TV shows; taking and displaying photos; capturing photos and videos; using the Maps app; reading ebooks; and so on. These chapters also cover some of the standard techniques that most apps share: installing, organizing, and quitting them; switching among them; and sharing material from within them.

• Part III, is a detailed exploration of the iPhone’s ability to get you onto the internet, either over a Wi-Fi hotspot connection or via the cellular network. It’s all here: email, web browsing, and Personal Hotspot (letting your phone serve as a sort of internet antenna for your laptop).

• Part IV, describes the world beyond the iPhone itself—like the copy of iTunes on your Mac or PC that can fill up the iPhone with music, videos, and photos; and syncing the calendar, address book, and mail settings. These chapters also cover Apple’s iCloud service, Continuity (the wireless integration of iPhones and Macs), and the Settings app.

• Part V, contains two reference chapters. Appendix A walks you through the setup process; Appendix B is a master compendium of troubleshooting, maintenance, and battery information.

About → These → Arrows

Throughout this book, you’ll find sentences like this: Tap Settings → General → Keyboard. That’s shorthand for a much longer instruction that directs you to open three nested screens in sequence, like this: “Tap the Settings icon. On the next screen, tap General. On the screen after that, tap Keyboard.” (In this book, tappable things and switches on the screen are printed in orange to make them stand out.)

About MissingManuals.com

Missing Manuals are witty, well-written guides to computer products that don’t come with printed manuals (which is just about all of them). Each book features a handcrafted index; cross-references to specific page numbers; and an ironclad promise never to put an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.

To get the most out of this book, visit MissingManuals.com. Click the Missing CDs link, and then click this book’s title to reveal a neat, organized list of the shareware, freeware, and bonus articles mentioned in this book.

The website also offers corrections and updates to the book; to see them, click the book’s title, and then click View/Submit Errata. In fact, please submit corrections yourself! Each time we print more copies of this book, we’ll make any confirmed corrections you’ve suggested. We’ll also note such changes on the website, so you can mark important corrections into your own copy of the book, if you like. And we’ll keep the book current as Apple releases more iPhone updates.

Group FaceTime

That’s right: You can now conduct video calls with up to 32 people simultaneously. Once you’ve started the call, you see the other participants on floating tiles, which get big and pop to the fore when somebody speaks. (You can also double-tap a tile to force someone to the front, even if she’s not speaking.)

This isn’t a novel invention (Hi, Google Hangouts! Hi, Skype!). But for the tens of millions of iPhone owners, it’s welcome and overdue.

Speed

iOS 12 is faster, even on older phones. Especially on older phones, actually, which is very nice of Apple. Since the new OS doesn’t require any more horsepower than before, if your phone now runs iOS 11, it’ll run iOS 12, too.

Digital Health

This year, Apple, Google, and Facebook have all introduced features designed to help us with our smartphone addictions. A new Settings screen called Screen Time offers options like these:

• Screen Time is a series of graphs that show how much time you’ve spent on the phone, how much time you spend in each app, how many times you wake your phone a day, and so on. (You’ll probably discover that that last statistic is horrifying.) You get a weekly summary, too.

• Downtime lets you schedule periods when you’re not allowed to use your phone, except for certain apps that you designate. During working hours, you could declare Facebook and Instagram off-limits, for example (yeah, sure).

• App Limits are daily time limits for categories of apps, like Games, Entertainment, and Social Networking.

• Restrictions. You can also block raunchy or violent movies, music, games, and so on. This is the old Parental Controls, just in a new place.

Screen Time is comprehensive, but also, unfortunately, complex. You can opt to apply these restrictions to your phone or to a child’s phone, you can have it apply to all your devices or only the one in your hand, you can require a password to override the blockades, you can manage the kids’ limits remotely from your own phone, and so on.

Improved Notifications

In iOS 12, your alerts enjoy enhancements like these:

• Grouped notifications. Notifications from each app can show up as a “stack,” a cluster, to be expanded with a tap (or dismissed en masse). Tap to expand a stack to see them individually, or swipe across to reveal buttons for clearing them all or “managing” them (read on).

• Quiet notifications. When you choose Manage for a certain app, you’re offered the chance to make it deliver notifications quietly: They’ll show up in the Notification Center, but won’t make sounds and won’t appear on the Lock screen. You’re also offered a Turn Off button for the app—a much easier way to shut up an app you don’t care about than having to drill into Settings.

• Ending times for Do Not Disturb. If you turn on Do Not Disturb (using the Control Center) as you enter a movie or a meeting, you can tell it to turn itself off when the time comes. You can have it turn off after an hour, as you leave your current location, or (if iOS knows from your calendar that you’re at a meeting) when that time slot ends. This is amazingly excellent. You’ll never again miss calls and texts because you forgot to turn off DND when the movie or the meeting ended.

• Do Not Disturb During Bedtime. You wake in the night, check your phone for the time, see all the piled-up notifications, get sucked in, and can’t get back to sleep. No more! A new Bedtime switch, in Settings → Do Not Disturb, hides all your notifications during your sleeping hours. In the morning, you can tap to see the notifications that have piled up while you were unconscious.

Augmented Reality

Apple continues to charge forward in making AR (augmented reality) a thing. That’s where the app superimposes text or graphics on top of the camera’s view of the world around you, which change angle and size as you move the phone around.

In ARKit 2, software companies can create multiplayer AR games. That is, two or more people, standing in different places, can see the same virtual 3D scene from their own angles, and play together.

iOS now comes with a demo AR app: a new tape-measure app called Measure, which lets you measure straight things around you just by aiming the camera. It’s accurate enough for estimating if a new table is going to fit in your apartment, but not accurate enough for, you know, NASA.

More Animated Emoji Fun

The iOS 12.1 update added more than 70 new emoji (a kangaroo at last!). And if you have an X-class iPhone (X, XR, XS, XS Max), you don’t have to be satisfied with the starter set of jumbo emoji that animate along with your facial expressions. Animoji have exploded:

• You can use any of four new ones (koala, tiger, T. rex, ghost).

• Animoji recordings can be up to 30 seconds long now instead of 10.

• Animoji respond to your tongue movements and winks, in addition to your face and mouth motions.

• You can design an Animoji that looks like you—a Memoji! Kind of like Bitmoji come to life. Or Nintendo Wii Mii characters. Or that crude thing Samsung had.

You can also plant your Memoji head onto your actual body when you’re taking a photo, shooting a video, or having a FaceTime or Messages chat.

In those two apps, you can also apply a new realm of special-effects filters to your live video image—one, for example, turns you into a cartoon—or even attach floating text to your body.

Annoyance Deaths

If you have an X-class iPhone, you’ll be thrilled to find that Apple has fixed some of the worst design flaws:

• Fewer accidental screenshots. On phones that take a screenshot when you press the volume-up key and side button, you wound up taking a lot of stupid screenshots of your Lock screen, since those buttons are across from each other, perfectly positioned to grab in your pocket. Now they don’t work until the phone is actually lit up.

• Swipe up to kill apps. For some inexplicable reason, Apple, in iOS 11, added an extra step to the process of force-quitting an app. You had to hold your finger down on its “card” for a second, then let go, and then swipe. No more. Now you just swipe up, as in days gone by.

• Two Face ID profiles. You can now teach Face ID what you look like twice. The second one could be you with different makeup or facial hair, or it could just be your romantic partner. It’s like having multiple fingerprints registered for Touch ID.

• Insta-retry Face ID. Before, if Face ID didn’t recognize you at first when you woke the phone, you’d have to lock it and then wake it again, or enter your passcode. Now you can just swipe up from the bottom for another try.

Photos App

The search box in this app can now find photos corresponding to multiple search terms (“skiing” + “December”). You can search for people, and places, and categories (like Hiking, Watersports, and Dogs), or by business names and categories (like “museum”), or by commercial events like concerts and sporting events.

Suppose you go to a party with friends. Now Photos’ new For You tab offers a subset of them worth sharing with those friends—and even offers their names so you can send the pictures to them! (Yes, just like Google Photos.) Then, when the friends get your photos, they’re shown photos of the same event that they took, and their iPhones suggest sharing those back to you, so that you each wind up with the whole set.

Siri and Shortcuts

Siri is getting better all the time. For example:

• You can say, “What’s my Hulu [or whatever] password?” She confirms your identity by face or fingerprint and then shows you the password.

• Siri can now answer questions about celebrities, food, nutrition, and motorsports.

• You can say, “Find my iPad” (or Mac, or iPhone); your lost device starts pinging loudly.

• You can now ask Siri to turn the phone’s flashlight on or off.

• “Hey Siri” works even in Low Power Mode.

• Siri is more proactive. She’ll notice what apps you tend to use at certain times and places, and pop up cards that she thinks will help you out. For example, if you always arrive at the gym at 7 a.m. on Monday mornings and open a workout app, that app will offer to open itself. And if you go to a movie, a tile will suggest turning on Do Not Disturb. (It’s exactly the same idea as Google Assistant, or even Apple’s own “Proactive Siri” from iOS 9—except that non-Apple apps can now be involved.)

The big-ticket item, though, is custom shortcuts.

In Settings → Siri & Search, there’s a huge list of Shortcuts: Canned commands like “Get directions to [your address],” “Create a note called [whatever],” “View recent photos,” “Check GOOG price,” “Record a new voice memo,” and so on.

You can record any Siri command you want for them. You can make “Siri, you getting this?” trigger the “Record a new voice memo” button. Or make “How am I doing?” show you the current Dow Jones stock index.

Other apps can put their own Siri commands into this list.

And so can you, thanks to a new app called Shortcuts. It lets you create your own multistep macros, each triggered by whatever spoken command you want.

The possibilities are endless and staggering. “Post last photo to Instagram.” “Tweet this song.” “Photos to GIF” (to create an animated GIF from your last five photos).

And maybe best of all, “Text that pic to my honey.”

The Speed Round

You can find over 100 little tweaks elsewhere in iOS 12. They won’t all make much difference to your routine, but at least Apple is trying:

• When some site texts you a security code, the iOS keyboard offers to paste it in for you.

• You can use Google Maps or Waze in CarPlay!

• There are new wallpaper options.

• The redesigned Voice Memos app syncs your audio recordings with Macs and iPads (and lets you chop pieces out of the middle).

• The redesigned Stocks app incorporates headlines about each company from the News app.

• The Stocks and Voice Memos apps are now on iPad (and Mac).

• The redesigned News app puts greater emphasis on human curation of stories.

• The Markup tool provides a full range of color, thickness, and opacity options.

• The battery stats no longer reset after every restart.

• “Favicons” (site icons) appear on Safari tabs.

• The Safari passwords screen points out when you’ve used the same password for multiple sites (a security no-no).

• Safari’s Password Autofill feature can now tap into non-Apple password apps like Dashlane and 1Password.

• There’s an option for automatic software-update download/install.

• There are more detailed battery-use statistics.

• The Dictionary has a new English thesaurus and three new dictionaries: Arabic-English, Hindi, and Hebrew.

• At some colleges, the Wallet app can hold your student ID (for payment and identification).

• You can transmit passwords among your Apple gadgets—from an iPhone to an Apple TV, for example, or an iPad to a Mac.

• The Podcasts app lets you adjust the time intervals for the skip back/skip ahead buttons.

• You can use your earbud clicker as a skip button while listening to a podcast.

• In Messages, when you tap the camera button, you get a full Camera-app experience for shooting a snap, complete with editing tools.

• In the Photos app, when you’ve imported pictures from a card or camera, you get statistics and import status.

• In the Music app, you can search for a song by its lyrics.

• The Lock screen shows you full previews of your email—you can scroll to read the whole thing.

• You can now use iOS’s dictation feature even with non-Apple keyboards (SwiftKey, Gboard, and the like).

• If you have AirPods on, you can use your phone as a remote microphone—great if you have trouble hearing the speaker across a noisy table or on a distant podium.

• Weather for many cities now shows an air-quality index.

• A dual–SIM card setup called eSIM on the XR, XS, and XS Max models lets you have two phone numbers on one device.

• Depth Control for the camera’s Portrait mode (available only on the XR, XS and XS Max models) lets you adjust the amount of background blurring in your images.

• Smart HDR brings better color accuracy under tricky lighting conditions to the front and rear-facing cameras in the iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max.

What It All Means

Let’s be honest: iOS has become a very dense operating system, with more features than you could master in years.

But never mind. It’s better, smarter, faster, clearer, and more refined than everything that came before. It takes hundreds of steps forward, and only a couple of tiny steps back.

That’s a lot of tweaks, polishing, and finesse—and a lot to learn. Fortunately, 700 pages of instructions now await you.