iPhone tips: you can do all this with the Control Center in iOS 18

The Control Center not only looks different in iOS 18, there are also new features and we will show you them in these iPhone tips!

iPhone tips: Control Center in iOS 18

You have probably already looked at the new Control Panel and perhaps made some adjustments. But you probably haven’t discovered all the new possibilities yet. That’s why we’ve listed them for you in this week’s iPhone tips!

Thanks to a new API, app developers can now also create buttons that are suitable for the Control Panel. We haven’t come across that yet, so unfortunately we don’t have a tip about that yet.

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1. Add controls

We start these iPhone tips with the most special new feature of the Control Center. You can now add controllers yourself. You do this as follows:

You can search for controls in the ‘Search controls’ search bar at the top of the screen, but you can also just scroll through all the options. It’s a combination of old controls (like Screen Recording) and new ones (like Ping My Watch). There’s also a Command called ‘Open App’ that turns any other app on your iPhone into a Controller. You can only open the app with this control, but it is useful if you want to tidy up the home screen, for example.

You can add as many controls to the Control Center as you want. To open other Control Center pages, swipe up or down, or tap the desired page icon at the far right of the screen.

2. Adjust controls

In number two of these iPhone tips, we’ll show you how to make the controls bigger. Some controls can be turned into tiles, others (such as Music) can even have their own Control Panel page. To get started, repeat the first two steps from tip 1.

In the new view, the border around each control is thicker in the lower right corner. Tap and drag this thicker section to make the slider larger. You can also adjust the order and location of the controls. This basically works the same way. Just drag them to where you want them, just like you do on the home screen.

3. Remove controls

Of course, you can also delete controls that you don’t need. We’ll show you how to do that in number three of these iPhone tips. It works in almost the same way as the adjustment in tip 2. The only difference is that you now do not use the thicker border, but tap the minus sign of a control.

This way you can easily create a minimalist Control Panel with only the controls you really need. If you delete the only control on a Control Panel page, you automatically delete that entire page.

4. Add control panel page

We conclude these iPhone tips by adding a Control Center page. By default, Control Center in iOS 18 has four pages: Favorites, Music Controls, HomeKit Devices, and Connectivity. You can add one or more pages yourself. To do this, repeat the first two steps from Tip 1 again.

Now swipe up until you see an empty page in front of you. You can now add controls again, in the same way as we showed in Tip 1. You can add as many controls as you want. If the Control Panel page is full, a new one will be added automatically.

You can restore the control panel in iOS 18.1

In iOS 18.1 there will most likely be a button that allows you to reset the Control Center to factory settings. If you have changed and adjusted too much, it is nice to have a new starting point. It is therefore ideal that Apple will add such a ‘reset’ button to the Control Center in iOS 18.1.

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