Accessing and Customizing the Control Center

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can access and customize the Control Center on the iPhone. Let’s go to my iPhone.

To access the Control Center, what we need to do is we need to swipe up from the bottom here. Now, if you have an iPhone X or greater, basically an iPhone without a home button, what you’ll do is you’ll swipe down from the upper left hand corner to get to the controls. Now being that I have an iPhone with a home button here, I’m going to swipe up from the bottom.

When I swipe up, so I go ahead and swipe up, we get our Control Center. We have various controls here. I can turn on airplane mode. I can disconnect from my wifi. I can also turn Bluetooth off. I can control my music. I can set it for Do Not Disturb, I have Do Not Disturb. And then I can set if I wanted to lock the orientation. I have brightness controls, as well as volume. I just swipe up and down to control these different controls. Below that we have flashlight. I just tap on the flashlight to turn it on, tap on it, to turn it off. A timer. Access to a calculator, as well as camera.

With some of these controls, we do have more options. As an example, if I go over to Do Not Disturb, I tap and hold on it, watch what happens. I can set it to turn back off after an hour, leave it on until this evening or turn it off when I leave this location. To get back to our Control Center, I just tap outside, and now we’re back at our Control Center.

Let’s say I wanted to see what options we have for music. What do I do? I tap and hold on it. And now we can see, we have more options, including airplay options. With the flashlight, I tap and hold on it, I can adjust the brightness. Slide this up to adjust the brightness. We can see that my flashlight is on. So now I just tap on it to turn it off.

We can also customize what controls are in here. To do that, we need to go to our Settings app. So I’m going to press in the Home button. And now what we do is we go over to Settings. From here what we do is we swipe up until we find Control Center.

The first option we have is access with an apps. When this is turned on, I’m going to be able to access the Control Center even from within an app. So I’m in the Settings app, if I swipe up from the bottom here, I get to my Control Center. If I turn this off, then what happens is when I’m in an app, again I’m in the Settings app, so when I swipe up from the bottom. You’re going to see, I can’t access the Control Center. So how do you access the Control Center? You can only access it from the Home screen. So when I go and press in the Home button, I swipe up, I get to my Control Center. If I’m in an app, let’s go back over to Settings, I swipe up, I cannot access the Control Center. So I’m going to turn this back on. I like to have access from within in any app.

Now let’s look at customizing it. When we customize it, what we’re able to do a set what controls we want to see in the Control Center. Now, some of the controls we will always see. This includes Do Not Disturb an Airplane Mode, but we do have additional controls I can add and remove. These are the controls that are included and we can remove these. So if I no longer want to have the Timer in there, all I do is just tap on the red here, and then I tap on Remove. And now the Timer is no longer in my Control Center.

I can also reorder how they’re arranged in the Control Center. So if I use the Camera, I can put that ahead of everything else.

To add a control, let’s say I wanted to add my Alarm in here, I access my alarms quite a bit. Tap on the green plus, and now we have Alarms. Let’s go and add another one. I’m going to go and add Low Power Mode. This is one of my favorite modes with the iPhone. If I’m going to be running low on battery, I will turn low power mode. I have a separate lesson on that. So let’s go ahead and tap on the green plus. And now when we go to the Control Center, I’m going to swipe up, we have our Control Center. We have my Camera first. Remember I rearranged it. I have my Alarms and now I have another row, including Low Power Mode.

So that’s how we access our Control Center and the various options we have, including customizing the Control Center. To access the Control Center. If we have a home button, we just swipe up from the bottom. If we have an iPhone without a home button, then we just swipe down from the upper right-hand corner. Some of the controls are a simple on an off, other ones you just slide up and down. And then with some of the controls, we can also tap and hold on it, and we’re going to have more options. If you want to customize a Control Center, you go into Settings and then Control Center. From there you can customize which controls you see in the Control Center.

So that’s the Control Center and how we can customize it on the iPhone.