Apple added a secret button to your iPhone, and you may not have even noticed

When various swipe gestures were introduced, a lot of folks (rightly) said it was an unusually undiscoverable move for Apple (the same was said of trackpad gestures on their laptops). I still see people doing far more interaction than necessary to accomplish certain tasks that have simple gestures available. And with force touch/long press, that got even more complicated, as some gestures can trigger different behavior if you press too hard/long (made more likely if your screen is cracked; I often accidentally go into the task switcher when I meant to go back in Safari).

All of that being said, while this is even less discoverable by far, it’s good that they’ve made it optional and arbitrarily configurable. Also a fairly unusual thing for Apple, though less so in the Cook era.

I felt like Apple has done so much to the OS that I downloaded the User Guides for iOS14 and macOS 14 from the Apple Book store.

These are huge guides! I just looked it up in the iOS guide and it is listed in there, but it is not listed in the “What’s New” section. I’m thinking that the “What’s New” section is only for big things, but whoa, that’s a lot of stuff to search through to find new “small” features!

Meh. This was innovative back in 2009 on Sony / Motorola phones. They actually went further and had haptic feedback, capacitive sensing on the back, or infrared sensors for “wave” type motion detection.

Hmm, interesting. A cheap touchscreen on the back of the phone could really improve one handed usability. The larger phones really make you reach for things. Would love to be able to claw a few gestures on the back of the phone like unselecting an autocorrect (which always has me hovering over the autocorrect bubble, but I’d love to just swipe with my index or middle finger on the back to ignore autocorrect for the word).

Two finger swipe on the back could shuffle browser tabs. This feels like a no brainer, what’s stopping this from being implemented?

Very cool. Also available on my iPhone 11.

Which iPhone upwards does it work from? Article didn’t say.

Knuckle gestures on Huawei Android are basically the same

I’ve set mine up for Spotlight. Now from any app it’s a quick double tap to open just about anything else on my phone.

I made a flashlight shortcut. Works well but I’d liked the gesture to be available with the screen off as well.

This is like that time a couple years ago when Apple added a way for you to use headphones with your phone.