The fact that your smartphone has a flashlight on the back is of course nothing new. However, if you’re using an Apple iPhone, there’s a little extra when it comes to using the light on the back. You can adjust the brightness of the LED light, which can be really handy in many situations.

The idea for this tutorial actually came to me when I showed the feature to Antoine and Camila at the MWC. Both were surprised that there is such a feature on the iPhone and that it is so easy to achieve. All you have to do to dim the display is:

  1. Open your iPhone’s control center – drag downwards to the right of Notch
  2. Press and hold the flashlight icon
  3. Drag your finger upwards to increase the brightness
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With this trick, you dim the flashlight with a swipe of your finger! / © NextPit

That’s it! But so that this tutorial doesn’t look quite so meager, there are a few more handy tricks that you can achieve in the control center by holding down your finger.

Check out more Control Center tricks! 

Holding down the entries in the control center allows for some more advanced settings. I will summarize them for you in a table:

Control Center shortcuts

Menu item Function while holding down
Display Quick control of “Dark Mode”, “Night Shift” and “True Tone.”
Timer Setting a timer without opening the clock app
Calculator Copying the last result of the calculator
Camera “Take selfie”, “Take video”, “Take portrait selfie”, “Take portrait selfie.”
Screen capture Quick selection to record targeted apps
Music recognition Opens the history of the last recognized songs
Wallet DeepL Access to specific cards

With these shortcuts, you can utilize your iPhone even more. On the iPad, the shortcuts are also available.

Did you already know the shortcuts and especially the flashlight trick on the iPhone? If so, I hope you still got something out of this tutorial. Feel free to let me know in the comments!

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