4 iPhone Tips to Help Your Relatives and Loved Ones this Holiday Season

While you’re visiting family this holiday season, if you’re the family tech guru you might get asked some questions about iPhone. This year, why not be a little more proactive and sit down with someone less tech savvy, and with a few tweaks, improve their iPhone experience?

Improve the Home Screen Experience

One of the best ways to improve an iPhone users experience is to help them customize their Home Screen experience. This means finding out what apps they use most often, and placing them front and center on the main Home Screen of iPhone.

To customize the Home Screen and app icons, tap and hold on the Home Screen or an app icon until the icons start to jiggle, then long press on an app and drag it to an easy to use location.

Make sure the iPhone Dock has four most used apps (the default selection of Phone, Safari, Messages are always a good choice, along with their media/music app of choice).

Add Useful Widgets

Other than making their most used apps easily accessible on the Home Screen, another super useful trick is to add a useful widget or two to the Home Screen. For example, adding a Weather widget can make seeing the weather conditions and forecast just a matter of glancing at the Home Screen on iPhone.

To add a widget, long press the Home Screen, then tap the “+” plus icon in the top left corner and add a widget, whether it’s Weather, Photos, Calendar, Stocks, or whatever they use most often or would find useful.

Fix iOS 18 Annoyances

iOS 18 has introduced some major changes that many users do not find to be a positive user experience, including a completely redesigned Photos app that has a strange interface, and most recently a frustratingly redesigned Mail app that makes it harder to find email for many users.

• Learn how to fix the Photos app redesign in iOS 18 to make it easier to use here
• Learn how to disable the Mail sender icons and contact photos in Mail app which clutter the interface
• Learn how to disable Mail Categories on iPhone to stop the annoying sorting of your email inbox

Enable iPhone Backups

A surprising number of people do not use iPhone Backups, of which you can get 5GB iCloud storage free, and every iPhone user should take advantage of. (And yes 5GB is paltry and while that’s not enough to backup photos or videos, it is enough to be able to backup Contacts, notes, and preferences). Ideally they will pay for more iCloud storage to be able to fully backup their device, but at the very least it’s a good idea to enable the free backup.

Head over to Settings then go to their name, then choose “iCloud” and then go to “iCloud Backup” and make sure this feature is enabled.

Consider Enabling Emergency Features

The iPhone has emergency features that are useful for many users to setup, including Medical ID that shows critical information like vitals, medications, allergies, and emergency contacts. There are also features like Emergency SOS, which users should understand how to use before enabling so they don’t accidentally call 911.

Go to Settings > Emergency SOS, and review the Emergency SOS feature.

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These simple tips will improve an iPhone users experience, so take the time to use your tech skips, help out your family, and perform a couple tweaks so their iPhone is easier to use.

Do you have any go-to tech tips to improve someone’s iPhone experience? Share with us in the comments!