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It’s meant to be an accessibility feature, but Back Tap in iOS 14 is an extremely convenient way to launch apps or run shortcuts. Here’s how to use it and what you can do with it.
There is very little chance that you will accidentally stumble upon the Back Tap feature of iOS 14, but once you know where it is, you will use it. With this feature enabled, you can tap on the back of your iPhone to get it to do any number of things.
You can open the Control Center, lock your iPhone, turn on the flashlight, or launch any of the other 20 system functions. Once you’ve gotten used to this, your only regret is not being able to make one tap do more than one thing. But you can.
Tap Back is limited to a double tap or a triple tap. However, you can configure one or both options to run a specific shortcut, and then that will allow you to control as many functions as you want.
How to set Back Tap
- Go Settings
- Scroll to Accessibility and touch
- Tap I touched
- Tap Touch Back
Now choose anyone Double touch or Triple tap. Whichever you choose, you get the same list of options.
Note that it can take a surprising time for the options page to open, because iOS is retrieving its full list of shortcuts. All of these are listed alphabetically in a section at the bottom of this screen.
Up at the top, there are two wide options, None and Accessibility shortcut. Below is a list of 13 system functions.
Touch to select any of these options, or the shortcuts below, and then touch Touch Back to return to the previous page.
LR Go to Settings, Accessibility, Touch and then Back Touch to configure this feature
Using Back Tap in iOS 14
Set up triple tap in exactly the same way, and that’s it. You will spend more time choosing which function you want from Back Tap than what you are setting up.
You now understand how this will start any app, or perform whatever task you have set to do, however only when you’ve been using it, did you appreciate how useful this is. Now you can, for example, reach into your pocket and activate a shortcut that sends a message to someone with your ETA instead.
You need an iPhone that supports the feature. However, all phones starting with the iPhone 8 do.
