How to Use iPhone Gestures to Navigate Your New iPhone X

The takeaway: This post will cover many of the actions you can complete using iPhone gestures:

Unlock your phone and go to the home screen
Check your notifications
Switch between apps
Swipe to search
Access the Today View
Open the Control Center

One of Apple’s long-standing goals, which they essentially achieved with the iPhone X, was to design a phone that’s all screen. To do so, the home button that controlled a lot of navigation features on previous models had to go. If you want to upgrade to the iPhone X but are worried you won’t know how to use it – fear not, the engineers at Apple are a creative bunch. The home button may be gone but its functionality lives on in a lot of intuitive new iPhone gestures.

Unlock your phone and go to the home screen

Unlocking a sleeping phone is a tricky balancing act. You need a method that’s not too easy as to constantly unlock the phone while it’s in your pocket but still allows you to get to the apps you need quickly. To make sure you (and only you) can unlock your phone easily while still protecting you from embarrassing butt-dials, the iPhone X’s Face ID feature allows users to unlock the device simply by looking at it.

With Face ID, just glance at the screen to securely unlock your phone. From there, it’s as simple as swiping up from the bottom of the screen to get to the home page.

Setting up Face ID will also help your complete purchases on your phone with Apple Pay and allow you to sign in to apps.

Here’s how to set up Face ID:

Go to Settings > Face ID & Passcode.
Position your face in front of your device and tap Get Started.
Look straight into your iPhone and place your face inside the frame.
Gently move your head to complete the circle. If you’re unable to move your head, tap Accessibility Options.
When you finish the first Face ID scan, tap Continue.
Gently move your head to complete the circle for a second time.
When Face ID setup is complete, tap Done.

Check your notifications

Even without the home button, the swipe gesture on the iPhone X makes it easy to see notifications like missed calls, texts and calendar reminders.

To see your notifications, just swipe down from the top of the screen.
To open an app that’s alerted you, just swipe right over the notification.
To respond to messages or see more information, swipe left over the notification and tap view.

Switch between apps

Say you’re scrolling through Instagram and remember you didn’t respond to an important email. Rather than having to close out of one app, go to the home screen and find your email, you can just use iPhone gestures to scroll through all your open apps.

To switch between apps, just swipe right along the bottom of the screen on the iPhone X. The other apps will cascade behind the current app you’re using, allowing you to scroll through to find the one you want. If you’re not using an app, you can just swipe from the bottom of the screen and pause, this will pull up available apps in the same view.

Swipe to search

iPhone gestures allow you to find all the information you need quickly – whether it’s something you’ve added to your device like calendar reminders, or information from around the web like nearby restaurants.

Here’s how to use iPhone gestures to search:

Swipe down from the middle of the Home screen.
Tap the Search field, then enter what you’re looking for. As you type, Search results update in real time.
To see more results, tap Show More or search directly in an app by tapping Search in App.
Tap a search result to open it.

Access the Today View

The iPhone’s Today View houses helpful widgets to show you information from your favorite apps. On the iPhone X, you can use a simple gesture to access this information. All you need to do is swipe right from the Home or Lock screen to get the latest news, check the weather or find out what’s on your calendar today.

Open the Control Center

The Control Center, available on phones with iOS 11 and later, allows you to quickly manage a variety of apps and features including:

Turn on the lights in your smart home
Control your Apple TV
Play music and skip songs
Check your email
Turn on/off Wi-Fi, airplane mode and Bluetooth connections

With the iPhone X, just swipe down from the upper-right corner of the screen to open the Control Center. To close it, swipe up from the bottom or simply tap the screen.

Hopefully, these new iPhone gestures will make it much easier to navigate the device. If you’re interested in upgrading, check out Simply Mac’s selection of new iPhones today.