If you are fond of watching a video while scrolling through the web or have to make notes while seeing a video, this feature is for you. The feature is currently supported by Apple TV, Safari, Podcasts, FaceTime, Music App, Home, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video. Once enabled, any video played in a supported app, when minimized, will take the form of a small screen on your iPhone. To further enhance your experience, you can pinch-in and -out to resize the screen or drag it to locate at your preferred location on the screen.
With iOS 14, you get to personalize your CarPlay with attractive wallpapers. Surpassing the traditional black screen on CarPlay, now you get 5 new vibrant wallpaper options for your CarPlay. The designs resemble that of your iPhone. You can also enable dark and light mode switching to improvise your experience further. The feature can be enabled and disabled from the Settings app in your CarPlay.
It isn’t very pleasant when you are in the middle of a game or are scrolling through an important draft on your iPhone, and you receive a call. Primarily because the call covers the entire screen. With iOS 14, instead of covering the full screen, you’ll receive incoming call notifications in the form of a banner over the screen’s top. You can enable or disable full-screen calls from the settings app. On the same banner, you’ll have the option to answer or ignore it. You can choose to avoid it by simply sliding up the banner out of the screen.
This is one of the first things you can do to personalize your iPhone Home Screen. You can also zoom in/out the picture for that perfect frame.
With iOS 14, you can now limit access to the photos. Restrict apps to the limited photos and videos in your gallery by adjusting the particular app’s settings. Another feature linked to photos is that you can add an image or video caption using the camera app itself. The photos and videos we hide in our iPhone go to ‘Hidden Folder.’ However, this folder remains visible amidst other images when using image picker through Facebook, Whatsapp, etc. Now, you can hide the hidden album. Go to Settings → Photos → turn the toggle off for Hidden Album.
With Sound Recognition, your iPhone uses the microphone and on-device intelligence to notify you of certain sounds like running tap, smoke alarm, pets, babies, car horn, doorbell, etc. It is an accessibility feature but can be useful for anybody. We have a separate post that shows you how to use iPhone Sound Recognition in iOS 14.
Certain apps request access to your microphone and camera. But after giving this access, you allow the apps to use your iPhone’s mic and camera as needed? With iOS 14 security enhancements, it is possible to know when this happens. You can learn about this through the indicator lights. While a green light will indicate the camera is in use, an orange light indicates the mic is on.
One of the most talked-about concerns people have in this smartphone age is sharing their location on the device. Though there are some excellent reasons behind doing so, making it available for all the apps is undoubtedly a threat to people’s privacy. With iOS 14, you can now hide your precise location for the apps you want. Hence, you can now restrict sharing your exact location with the apps you want and allow it only for the necessary apps like cab or delivery services.
Control Center is one easily accessible place for handy buttons like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, music, flashlight, brightness, and more. You can add some other handy buttons to it like Low Power Mode, Music Recognition, Code Scanner, etc.
I have different ringtones for different contacts. Even when my iPhone is kept somewhere else, the custom tone easily lets me know who is calling (in most cases). You, too, can start by setting a custom tone for individual contacts like siblings, parents, etc.