Tired of fumbling around in the dark? With iOS 14 or later on an iPhone 8 or newer, you can quickly turn on and off your flashlight with two or three taps on the back of your iPhone using a feature called Back Tap. Here’s how to set it up.
How Does Back Tap Work on iPhones?
Back Tap is an iOS accessibility feature that detects physical finger taps on the back of your iPhone using your phone’s built-in accelerometer. It works on the iPhone 8 and newer iPhones. When configured in Settings, you can use two or three taps to launch many different actions on your phone, including shortcuts, which is what we’ll use here to turn on the flashlight.
It used to be necessary to create a special flashlight shortcut to make this work, but no longer.
Turn Your iPhone’s Flashlight on with Back Tap
First, we need to activate Back Tap. Open up Settings.
In Settings, navigate to Accessibility> Touch.
In “Touch Settings,” select “Back Tap.” It is at the bottom of the page.
In “Back Tap” settings, choose whether you’d like to activate your flashlight using two taps (“Double Tap”) or three taps (“Triple Tap”) on the back of your phone, then select the matching option.
Next, scroll down through the actions list until you see the Flashlight option. A blue checkmark will appear next to it once it is active.
Press back once to make sure the change is registered, then exit Settings.
The next time you double or triple tap the back of your iPhone (depending on how you set it up), your iPhone flashlight will turn on. Tap the back two or three times again to turn it off. Have fun illuminating dark spaces!