iPhone expert: 6 ways to customize iOS 2023

What’s the device that you have with you almost every minute of the day? For many of our users, it’s their iPhone. From social media to notes, to reminders and searches — you’re on your phone all the time.

Get some of that time back, by using your phone more efficiently: IFTTT helps all your apps work together, automatically collects information for you, and organizes all the thoughts flying around in your head. Applets that work with iOS are some of our most popular, but it's possible that you’re not taking full advantage of everything we have to offer.

Customize Siri

The ability to create custom Siri phrases and commands means that your phone can immediately connect to any of your Applets. In other words, you can unlock the ability to control your home with your Apple device and IFTTT. Setting up the Applets and custom phrases only takes a few minutes. Check out our blog to learn more here.

Shortcuts

In addition to the ability to create custom Siri phrases, the Shortcuts app has many applications that IFTTT can enhance. Use a combination of Shortcuts and IFTTT to fully connect your smartphone to your devices and to optimize your day. You check out our complete tutorial here.

Organize your day with iOS Calendar

The iOS Calendar app, with its handy “Up Next” widget, can help you organize your day — but only if the information you want is there.

Think beyond meetings: Applets can add things like the weather report to your calendar, so you can start the day feeling prepared for anything. Or, you can use it to track accomplishments too, like workouts or completed tasks.

Additionally, syncing your iOS Calendar with other calendars or task management systems makes it easy to stay on track.

Applets can also help you capture important information throughout the day by automatically appending meeting notes to key events and syncing with your to-do lists.

Safeguard your memories with iOS Photos

The iPhone has turned us all into photographers. With the increasingly visual nature of social media and the ease of taking and storing photos, people are snapping more pics than ever before. Applets make it easy to track, store, and share photos.

It’s always a good idea to have backups of the photos you take, but if you have to do it manually, it rarely happens. Applets can create automatic backups of every magic moment.

If you are interested in photos from around the globe (and out of this world). Add photos to iOS photo albums with Applets that pull from social media, the Library of Congress — even outer space!

Build healthy habits with iOS Health

One way to build and maintain healthy habits is to track them. Push all your data into one place with health Applets — your phone is always on you, so you won’t have any excuses.

If you use a wearable, like a Fitbit device, Applets can automatically send data from your device to the Health app.

You don’t have to have devices to log your data for you, but manually tracking your health is hard. Applets that work with widgets can help you log important metrics with a few quick taps.

Streamline your to-do lists with iOS Reminders

Do you ever feel like you’re using 100 different apps and services to create to-do lists? When you’re reading your email, you star one to remember to come back to it later. But then when you have some time to get things done, you check your to-do list app on your iPhone. It’s impossible to keep track of it all. Here’s how you can sort it out.

No matter where you create or save your to-do item, use IFTTT to make sure it gets into the Reminders app on your phone. Then you’ll just have one place to look.

If you spend more time in your calendar or prefer a different to-do app, IFTTT can send everything there instead.

Upgrade your address book with iOS Contacts

While you may not use your iPhone to call people very regularly, you probably still make good use of the Contacts app to store phone numbers and email addresses. Address books feel old school, but here are some tips to bring yours into the modern age.

Sync your contact lists across email and your phone so you can get the full picture no matter where you look. Or try backing up to a Google spreadsheet — when it's time to send out holiday emails, a party invitation, or follow-up with leads, you'll be able to sort and prioritize easily.

Applets can also add important context to your contacts. Sync them to your calendar so you can keep track of where and when you met someone.

Discover great reads with iOS Reading list

The Reading List is a feature of Safari that allows you to save articles for later. You access it by clicking the open book in the bottom bar of Safari and then selecting the reading glasses at the top. As you’re browsing different websites in Safari, you can click the share button to add the current page to your Reading List — or you can use Applets and have your list automatically populated for you!

Why wait for an upgrade? Connect your favorite services to iOS and take your iPhone to the next level. Download our iOS app to get started.