25 Key iPhone Settings to Change (2025)

Apple’s software design strives to be intuitive, but each iteration of iOS contains so many additions and tweaks that it's easy to miss some useful iPhone settings. Apple focused on artificial intelligence when it unveiled iOS 18 in 2024 and followed it with Liquid Glass in iOS 26 (the name is now tied to the following year), but many intriguing customizations and lesser-known features lurk beneath the surface. Several helpful settings are turned off by default, and it's not immediately obvious how to switch off some annoying features. We’re here to help you get the most out of your Apple phone.

Once you have things set up the way you want, it’s a breeze to copy everything, including settings, when you switch to a new iPhone. For more tips and recommendations, read our related Apple guides—like the Best iPhone, Best iPhone 17 Cases, Best MagSafe Accessories—and our explainers on How to Set Up a New iPhone, How to Back Up Your iPhone, and How to Fix Your iPhone.

Updated September 2025: We’ve added a few new iPhone tips and updated this guide for iOS 26.

Make cold-calling pests a thing of the past with Apple's new Call Screening feature. Go to Settings, Apps, and select Phone, then scroll down to Screen Unknown Callers and select Ask Reason for Calling. Now, your iPhone will automatically answer calls from unknown callers in the background without alerting you. After the caller gives a reason for their call, your phone will ring, and you'll be able to see the response onscreen so you can decide whether to answer. You should also make sure Hold Assist Detection is toggled on, so your iPhone detects when you are placed on hold, allowing you to step away, then alerting you when the call has been picked up by a human.

The texting experience with Android owners (green bubbles) got seriously upgraded last year when Apple decided to finally support the RCS messaging standard (rich communication services). RCS has been around for several years on Android, and allows for a modernized texting experience with features like typing indicators, higher-quality photos and videos, and read receipts. Group chats may still be wonky, but they're still a significant improvement. However, on a new iPhone, RCS is disabled by default (naturally).

Make sure you turn it on for the best messaging experience. Head to Settings > Apps > Messages > RCS Messaging and toggle it on.

Swipe down from the top right of the screen to open the Control Center, and you’ll see it's more customizable than ever. You can tap the plus icon at the top left or tap and hold on an empty space to open the customization menu. Here you can move icons and widgets around, remove anything you don’t want, or tap Add a Control at the bottom for a searchable list of shortcut icons and widgets you can organize across multiple Control Center screens. You can also customize your home screen to change the color and size of app icons, rearrange them, and more.

You know those lock screen controls that default to flashlight on the bottom left and camera on the bottom right? You can change them. Press and hold on an empty space on the lock screen and tap Customize. Tap the minus icon to remove an existing shortcut, and tap the plus icon to add a new one. You can also change the weather and date widgets, the font and color for the time, and pick a wallpaper. One of the clocks will even stretch to adapt to your wallpaper.

While it’s good to have your screen timeout for battery saving and security purposes, I find it maddening when the screen goes off while I’m doing something. The default screen timeout is too short in my opinion, but thankfully, you can adjust it. Head into Settings, Display & Brightness, and select Auto-Lock to extend it. You have several options, including Never, which means you will have to manually push the power button to turn the screen off.

The iPhone’s keyboard clicking sound when you type is extremely aggravating. Trust me, even if you don’t hate it, everyone in your vicinity when you type sure does. You can turn it off in Settings, Sounds & Haptics by tapping Keyboard Feedback and toggling Sound off. I also advise toggling off the Lock Sound while you’re in Sound & Haptics.

Protect yourself from eye-searing glare with dark mode. Go to Settings, pick Display & Brightness, and tap Dark. You may prefer to toggle on Automatic and have it change with the sun setting, but I prefer to be in Dark mode all the time.

If you’re determined to squeeze as many years out of your iPhone battery as possible, consider changing the charging limit. You can maximize your smartphone's battery health if you avoid charging it beyond 80 percent. The iPhone’s default is now Optimized Battery Charging, which waits at 80 percent and then aims to hit 100 percent when you are ready to go in the morning. But there’s a slider you can set to a hard 80 percent limit in Settings, under Battery, and Charging. If it bugs you, this is also where you can turn Optimized Battery Charging off.

If you get worried about running out of battery, go to Settings, Battery, and scroll down to select Power Mode, where you can toggle on Adaptive Power. This mode will detect when you are using more battery life than normal and make little tweaks, like lowering display brightness or limiting performance, to try and get you through to the end of the day.

Folks with an iPhone 15 Pro model, any iPhone 16 model, or any iPhone 17 have an Action Button instead of the old mute switch. By default, it will silence your iPhone when you press and hold it, but you can change what it does by going to Settings, then Action Button. You can swipe through various basic options from Camera and Flashlight to Visual Intelligence, but select Shortcuts if you want it to do something more interesting. If you’re unfamiliar, check out our guide on How to Use the Apple Shortcuts App.

The iPhone 16 series debuted Camera Control, a physical button that sits below the power button and triggers the camera with a single press. When you're in the camera app, pressing it will capture a photo, and a long-press will record a video. Pressing and holding Camera Control outside of the camera app triggers Apple's Visual Intelligence feature (sort of like Google Lens). But what I find most annoying is Camera Control's second layer of controls: swiping. You can swipe on the button in the camera app to slide between photography styles, zoom levels, or lenses. It's neat in theory, but way too sensitive.

Head to Settings > Camera > Camera Control to customize how the button works. Specifically, I suggest tapping Customize, then toggling off Light Press and Swipe.

Much vaunted but slightly underwhelming, Apple Intelligence isn’t fully baked yet, and we are still waiting for an improved Siri. If you prefer to opt out of certain features or opt out completely, go to Settings, Apple Intelligence & Siri, and tap on it to toggle Apple Intelligence off. If you prefer to keep select features on, you can find instructions in our How to Turn Off Apple Intelligence guide.

Whether you are embarrassed by your Candy Crush addiction or risque photos, or perhaps you’ve been using the Notes app to plan your partner’s birthday party, you can hide them from prying eyes. I'm not here to judge. To protect an app, you have two options: tap and hold on the icon and select Require Face ID, then Require Face ID, or Hide and Require Face ID. The first option leaves the app in place, but no one can access it without a Face ID check. If you prefer to hide the app, choose the second option and then Hide App, and it will be obscured inside a Hidden folder at the bottom of your App Library that requires a Face ID check to open.

If you find it irritating that videos automatically play as you scroll through the Photos app, or it bugs you that they loop and repeat instead of stopping at the end, you can change that behavior. Tap Settings, Apps, then Photos, and scroll down to toggle Auto-Play Motion and Loop Videos off.

It can be tough to make out the dialogue in some TV shows and movies, but Apple has a fix for muffled speech on your iPhone. When you’re playing a video, tap the screen to bring up the menu and select the audio icon. You can select Enhance Dialogue and choose Enhance or Enhance More to make the voices louder and clearer.

At an absolute minimum, you should silence your iPhone at night so it doesn’t disturb your sleep, but Apple offers a wide range of tools to automate or schedule downtime to help you focus. Go to Settings, Focus, and choose Do Not Disturb to get started. You can turn off notifications, but set up exceptions so that specific contacts or apps will get through. You can also go to Screen Time and Downtime to set a specific schedule for each day.

You don’t have to use Safari as your browser or Apple’s Mail app for emails. You can change the default apps on your iPhone by going to Settings, Apps, and Default Apps. If you have valid alternative apps installed for Email, Messaging, Browser App, and a few other categories, you can select them instead of Apple’s apps.

You can choose to keep certain files that you have synced with iCloud stored locally on your iPhone, which is handy if you want to access them when there’s no internet available. Open the Files app, go to the Browse tab, and choose iCloud Drive. You can tap and hold on any folder or file and select Keep Downloaded to keep a copy on your iPhone.

It’s worth reviewing your app permissions and limiting them. There are a few routes to do this, but Settings, then Privacy & Security, might be the easiest. There’s a lot here, but I advise looking at Location Services and removing or reducing permissions for apps you don’t think need them. You can toggle off Precise Location for many, since an approximate location is often enough for them to function the way you want. Other apps to keep an eye on are Contacts and Photos, as both now give you the option to allow limited access.

By the way, if you want to turn off Background App Refresh to stop apps from sucking down data and draining the battery when you aren’t using them, go to Settings, Apps, and choose any you don’t need to refresh unless you open them to toggle it off.

Apple offers a whole range of voices for Siri. Go to Settings, choose Apple Intelligence & Siri, and tap Voice to see a list of variations (American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, South African) and voices (Irish Voice 2 is my pick). Just be aware that if you choose a new one, it may take a while to download.

Forget about typing out your whole email address every time. Go to Settings, General, and choose Keyboard. Tap Text Replacement and then the plus icon at the top right to set up text shortcuts, such as “eml” for your full email address, or “addy” for your mailing address. This can also work for any other text you type out frequently.

Apple is all about privacy, but having to unlock your iPhone to see the content of an incoming message can be annoying. You can change how this works by going to Settings, Notifications, and selecting Show Previews. It is set to When Unlocked by default, but you can choose Always or Never.

Apple's Live Translation feature has been integrated into the Phone, FaceTime, and Messages apps. You can have your speech translated during calls and spoken in a synthesized voice, and live captions appear for FaceTime, but only for one-to-one calls in English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Text translations in Messages also support Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. It happens automatically in calls, provided you have an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, iOS 26 installed, and Apple Intelligence enabled. In FaceTime, you need to open Control Center and have Live Captions toggled on. In Messages, you can select a conversation and tap on the other person's name at the top to toggle on Automatically Translate.

If you decide to give AI a chance and fancy generating some art with AI assistance, open up the Playground app. You can pick photos, themes, costumes, accessories, places, or type prompts. Here’s a full guide on how to use Apple’s Image Playground. It's available on Apple devices running iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, or macOS Sequoia 15.2 or later.

Do you get nauseous when you use your iPhone as a car passenger? Go to Settings, Accessibility, choose Motion, then Vehicle Motion Cues. You can turn it on or off to display dots that help reduce motion sickness, but if you tap Automatically in Vehicle, it will turn on when it detects you are in the car.

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