Find out the iPhone's back touch feature on iOS 14

“Touch the back” – great “Back Tap” is one of the small features and improvements not mentioned by Apple during WWDC 2020, but it is still very useful.

“Touch the back” is a new assistive technology in iOS 14 that allows you to choose a custom action that the operating system will automatically execute when you touch the back of the phone.

You can check out this feature in Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Tap on the back (Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap)This cool, new feature makes it easy to perform a custom action when you double or triple tap the back of your iPhone. It works thanks to a combination of motion sensors in the iPhone like the accelerometer to detect motion that happens when you touch the back of the phone.

This is a completely different feature from the Tap Back feature currently available in Messages for iOS and macOS including heart, slide your finger up / down, laughter, and more.

You can set a different action for double and triple touch gestures. The list of actions you can choose from in this feature includes some common system-wide commands in iOS, such as Control Center and notifications, and app switcher. (App Switcher), Siri, Spotlight search bar, …

For example, you can add the volume up and down action to these gestures to quickly adjust the volume by touching the back of the iPhone. Or, you can assign a screen lock action to turn off the screen without pressing the power button.

Besides, Apple also allows you to assign a custom Siri shortcut to them. So now you can ask your iPhone to perform a complex sequence of actions involving multiple apps and code snippets you created in the Shortcuts app.

The feature “Touch the back” still works normally even if you have glued the skin on the back or used a cover, just a light touch will recognize the command. However, it is only compatible with iPhone X series and above: