How to Enable Back Tap on your iPhone. The back tap feature on iPhone is one of those features that probably should get used more often, but it looks like barely anyone is aware of the feature or even talk about it. Apple themselves even choose to hide the feature right under a stack of menus, despite the fact that it is generally useful. The feature is great as a shortcut command and from an accessibility standpoint.
iPhone Back Tap Feature
What the back tap actually does for you is that it offers you the option to assign one of the several specific iPhone functions to pair of simple physical inputs: double-tapping or triple-tapping right on the back of the iPhone. As stated by Apple, this feature is accessible specifically on your iPhone models iPhone 8 or newer, running iOS 14 or newer.
Once it has been set, all that is required of you is to make the required number of steady, sharp taps against the back of your iPhone and Whatever function you assigned would be activated immediately. And you are not to even worry about making use of a case as the input seems to be registered through the iPhone’s internal motion sensors. The only trick here is to get a feel for the tapping pattern, which should not take that much effort.
Using Back Tap
The basic reason why you might want to enable the back tap is that it simply makes it a bit easier to activate certain functions right on your iPhone. If for example, you decided to be able to get your camera ready, and sometimes activating it through the lock screen is a little bit clunky, you can choose to assign it to a double-tap or triple-tap. That way, you can choose to pull out your phone, tap the back without having to look at a menu, and you are set to take pictures.
Or let’s say you find swiping partway up from the bottom of your screen to view your iPhone’s App Switcher, you can choose to connect it to the back taps instead of having to worry about accidentally tapping on a link that you want to switch out of “Safari” or anything like that. You can make use of it to take a screenshot, or even turn on your flashlight, and so on.
You can also set the back tap in conjunction with various Accessibility features like AssistiveTouch, the Magnifier, VoiceOver, and more. Well, this offers you more freedom of being able to turn a couple of these assistive features on and off when you want without having to access your menus – once the back tap has been set up.
How to Enable Back Tap
Actually, setting up the Back tap is a little bit more involved than making use of it, but just a bit. You would be required to dig through a few menus to get there but once you know where to find it, the rest is just a tap.
- First launch your iPhone Settings menu
- Then head to accessibility
- At this point, select touch at the top of the physical and motor section of the menu
- Scroll to the bottom and then touch the menu and you would see the Back tap. The feature shows off seeing as you might be trying to use it for the very first time.
- Choose Back tap and you would be presented with both double tap and Triple tap, each of which can be assigned to a function
- Just tap on the once that you wish to assign and then select from the list of system, accessibility, and scroll gestures commands.
- As soon as you assign a function to one of these gestures, you would be able to start making use of it immediately.
You probably should test out these features on your camera or flashlight, so you can practice how your iPhone wants you to tap to be effective.
