iOS 14 lets you perform actions by tapping the back of your iPhone

Now that iOS 14 beta is in the hands of developers (and adventurous non-devs), news about little gems of features not announced at the keynote are popping out all over the web.

One of them is Back Tap, an accessibility setting hidden under Settings > Accessibility > Touch.

Back Tap allows you to double- or triple-tap the back of your iPhone to perform actions quickly.

The number of actions that Apple allows through Back Tap is surprisingly large.

You can use it to open Control Centre, bring up the Home screen, lock the screen, mute the phone, take a screenshot, invoke Siri, control volume and more.

You can also tag it to accessibility settings such as Magnifier, Smart Invert, Speak Screen, VoiceOver and Zoom.

Power users are also going gaga over Back Tap because it can hook up to shortcuts you’ve created in the Shortcuts app.

This opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Imagine tapping the phone to kickstart a workflow or bring up Google Assistant.

Unfortunately, it seems like Back Tap isn’t available on all iPhones that support iOS 14. For one, the iPhone 6s series doesn’t support it.

It’s possible that this is only available for iPhones that support Tap to Wake, which is an iPhone X and up feature.

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.