Back Tap Accessibility

In this video, we’re going to be taking a look at the Back Tap feature on the iPhone. This was introduced with iOS 14. With the Back Tap feature, what we’re able to do is tap the back of our iPhone two times, or three times, and have a do specific things, such as tapping on a twice will open up the app switcher, tapping on at three times will open up the notification center. Let’s see how Back Tap works on the iPhone. Let’s go to my iPhone.

Now the Back tap feature is an accessibility option. So the first thing we need to do to set this up, is go to our Accessibility settings. These are located in our Settings app. So now I tap on Settings, and then I go over to Accessibility. From here, I need to go to Touch. So I’m going to Settings>Accessibility> and then Touch.

You’re going to see at the very bottom here Back Tap. I have mine turned off, so I could tap the back of my iPhone, and it won’t do anything right now. But when I tap on this, what I’m able to do is set what happens when I double tap on it or triple tap on it. So let’s go with a double-tap first. I tap on it, and now let’s set this to open up my app switcher. So now I just tap on that, and we can see that my double tap has set to open up my app switcher. I’m going to go back, and let’s set our triple-tap here to open up my notification center. I tap on it. And now it’ll open up my notification center. We can see we have a number of different options for both our double tap and triple tap, including shortcuts. So we can even have it open up an app using a shortcut. So I have mine set to double-tap going to open up my app switcher. A triple-tap is going to open up my notification center. So now, let’s see this in action.

Now the way that I’m going to show you how this works is by bringing my iPhone’s live feed. Here we can see we have my iPhone. This is a live feed of my iPhone, and now I’m going to rotate slightly here so you can see me tapping on the back.

Now watch what happens when I tap on it twice. It should open up my app switcher. So I go one, two, there’s my app switcher. I tap twice again; it brings me back to my home screen. So what do you think’s going to happen when I tap on it three times, the back of it, three times? It should open up my notification center. One, two, three. There’s my notification center.

So that’s the new Back Tap feature we have on the iPhone; with the back Tap feature, we can set what happens when we tap on our iPhone’s back twice or three times. To set what happens, you just go to your Settings app>accessibility> and then Touch. At the very bottom, you’re going to see Back Tap. Open up those settings, and from there, you can set what happens with your iPhone when you tap the back of it twice or three times.

So that’s the Back Tap feature we have on the iPhone.