iPhone: The Missing Manual, 8th Edition

Chapter 18. Settings

The Settings app is like the Control Panel in Windows or System Preferences on the Mac. It’s a tweaking center that affects every aspect of the iPhone: the screen, ringtones, email, Web connection, and so on.

Most of the items on the Settings page are doorways to other screens, where you make the actual changes. When you’re finished inspecting or changing the preference settings, you can return to the main Settings screen by tapping the Settings button in the upper-left corner—or jump out of Settings altogether by pressing the Home button.

In this book, you can read about the iPhone’s preference settings in the appropriate spots—wherever they’re relevant. And the Control Center, of course, is designed to eliminate trips into Settings.

But so you’ll have it all in one place, here’s an item-by-item walkthrough of the Settings app and its structure in iOS 8.

Two Settings Tricks

The Settings app is many screens deep. You might “drill down” by tapping, for example, General, then Keyboard, then Shortcuts. It’s a lot of tapping, a lot of navigation.

Fortunately, you have two kinds of shortcuts.

First, you can jump directly to a particular Settings screen—from within any app—using Siri (Chapter 4). You can say, for example, “Open Sound settings,” “Open Brightness settings,” “Open Notification settings,” “Open WiFi settings,” and so on. Siri promptly takes you to the corresponding ...