Although iOS 10 brings with it a few subtle visual and mechanical changes, some of its alterations to the most-used iPhone software features will probably be pretty easy to spot. One of those is the new Control Center, which has not only received a cosmetic upgrade, but has gotten a few new added abilities as well.
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The Control Center, in essence, is no longer a single card stocked with all of the expected iOS features you've become used to seeing (like the flashlight, calculator, and timer) — it's now a sliding collection of three panels. The first is a basic launchpad of settings like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the second is dedicated to Apple Music, and the third houses your favorite accessories from Apple's new HomeKit-focused app 'Home.'
Control Center in iOS 9 (left) and iOS 10 (right)
Some of these shuffled-around buttons can make Control Center in iOS 10 a bit discombobulating when you first bring it up, so follow this guide to get a general impression of how to use Control Center, and how to find your favorite features that may not be where they were before.
From anywhere in iOS 10 (including the main lock screen), swipe up from the bottom of the iPhone to bring up Control Center. The landing tab of Control Center mirrors a lot of the features from iOS 9 and prior versions of iOS, because it's there you'll find Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb, and Portrait Orientation Lock buttons lined up along the top of the tab, all sitting above the brightness toggle.
The second row of buttons brings the first major Control Center change in iOS 10: two medium-sized squares for AirPlay Mirroring and AirDrop, whose locations have been flipped this time around. AirPlay Mirroring lets you mirror your iPhone screen on a connected Apple TV, while the AirDrop button lets you toggle between 'Receiving Off,' 'Contacts Only,' and 'Everyone' for Apple's media sharing tool.
Night Shift has its own dedicated row, so you can enable or disable the feature before its scheduled on/off times — in iOS 9 it was a small icon between timer and calculator. Lastly, at the bottom of the first Control Center tray, you'll find the Flashlight, Timer, Calculator, and Camera, unchanged from iOS 9. New, however, are 3D Touch shortcuts for each app: the Flashlight can change intensity, Timer includes common interval options, Calculator lets you copy the last result, and Camera has multiple picture options.
While in the first panel of Control Center, swipe left to switch over to the Apple Music panel. With the iOS 10 update, Apple has moved music playback and volume controls into its own separate panel. The change will undoubtedly be a hassle for many iOS users who listen to music regularly, but with a dedicated section of Control Center a few of the controls have been enlarged and a new feature has been added.
After starting a song in Apple Music, the new panel will come alive with the currently playing track, name of the artist and album, and scrub controls to jump to any section of the song. You can tap on any of these text readouts, and even the album artwork, to jump into the full Apple Music app. In addition to basic play, pause, rewind, and fast-forward buttons, and a volume toggle, Apple has introduced a new broadcast feature in Control Center as well.
The button is located all the way at the bottom of the Apple Music section, and should default to 'iPhone,' so tap on it to see a list of potential devices you can connect to in order to expand the listening capabilities of the current track to a larger group. These devices could include any Bluetooth speaker within range that you've already set up via Settings, or a 3rd or 4th generation Apple TV. Choose whichever output you prefer to transfer playback to, and you can reset the iPhone as default by returning to Control Center, or simply powering down the connected device.
If you plan on using Apple's new HomeKit app 'Home,' the third panel of Control Center should prove useful. Once synced up with any compatible HomeKit accessories in the main app, you can swipe left twice from the Control Center launchpad to gain a few basic controls over your smart light bulbs, thermostat, and more.
Before you get started in Control Center, make sure you have your accessories installed in Home. On the main screen in the app, tap 'Edit' in the top right corner to rearrange your favorite accessories, the top nine of which will appear in Control Center. You can follow the same process to prioritize your favorite scenes to activate in Control Center.
Within its section of Control Center, Home's actions are straightforward: you can tap each accessory to either turn it on or off, depending on its current state. More useful is a clever 3D Touch gesture that brings up a brightness toggle that allows for incremental percentage control of a connected lightbulb such as Hue, for example. Tap 'Color' at the bottom of this screen to dive into a dynamic color wheel to pick six preset color options, or edit one to jump into a rainbow color selector to truly customize your lights within Control Center.
A 'Temperature' wheel further lets you choose from brighter blue light or softer orange light. Although not automatic, this option is similar to Night Shift, letting you generate softer light at night to encourage better sleep. You can tap any empty space in these 3D Touch menus to return to Control Center.
To get a glimpse of your favorite scenes — which are grouped collections of HomeKit accessories — tap the 'Scenes' button in the top right of Control Center's third panel. Here you'll see your top eight favorite scenes, which offer similar on/off controls for each scene, but without any expanded 3D Touch support. Tap 'Accessories' to return to the favorite accessories tab.
iOS 10 is full of new features that you'll find when you start playing around with the software update. Keep checking back with MacRumors for more helpful how-tos on everything from creating and sending handwritten text messages to avoiding tolls in Apple Maps to using lyrics in Apple Music and more.
![Why Does The Control Center Not Come Up For Mac Why Does The Control Center Not Come Up For Mac](http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/fix-airdrop-not-working-ios-2.jpg)
It's right there on your iPhone —but many people don't even know its name. Yet once you get in the habit of swiping into Control Center, it's a feature that will save you time, and one that you can can make even more useful by customizing extensively.
September sees the fifth anniversary of Control Center on iPhones and iPads. It was introduced with iOS 7 in 2013, and has changed and evolved since then —but the primary function remains the same.
Since iOS 11, Control Center has been a single pane that you swipe to call up and swipe to dismiss. Right now you swipe in different places depending on which iPhone you have, though.
For the iPhone X, you need to swipe from the top right hand corner downwards to summon it. Then swipe up to dismiss it. For all other iPhones, at least at the moment, you swipe up from the bottom to call and swipe down to close it again.
You can expect this to change, though. Currently the beta for iOS 12 has moved the swipe on the iPad to match the iPhone X gesture. That might be a clue that new iPads are coming with similar designs to the iPhone X, but in any case the odds are that Apple will eventually make the swipe consistent across all devices.
By default, the Control Center contains 11 options with many arranged into panels. At top left there is one for connectivity which is in theory a handy place to switch off WiFi, Bluetooth and any mobile data connection.
Only, it doesn't do quite what you expect. If you tap to switch off Bluetooth then it disconnects any current connections but doesn't completely disable the feature.
Similarly, tapping on WiFi will drop your current connections but it won't actually switch off WiFi.
It's so that your phone can continue to use features such as AirDrop between devices. It's so that the phone can communicate with Apple Pencil and Apple Watch.
If you don't want that and also don't want your battery being drained by them, tap the Airplane Mode button. That at least switches off WiFi and Mobile Data. To also switch off Bluetooth, you'll have to go into your iPhone's Settings.
Hard press on this connectivity section to get more options. This works whether you have an iPhone that supports 3D Touch or not: you can press and hold for a moment to get the extras.
It seems to defeat the purpose of Control Center to have options that are hidden away but when you open these up, you see six controls. Four are as you've seen them on the main Control Center but then there are extras for Personal Hotspot and for AirDrop.
This is where you can set who is allowed to automatically AirDrop items to you. That's convenient but you'd never know it was there unless you pressed.
Maybe you use Personal Hotspot regularly but the odds are that you use music more. Which means that hiding a feature in this section is more of a pain.
To be fair, it's less hidden and more misdirection. The music section of Control Center contains a small icon at top right that's like a radio signal. Once you've seen that, you can tap on it to get control over what speaker the audio comes from —the iPhone's own one, headphones or nearby HomePod for instance —plus what the volume is.
Only, force press or press-and-hold anywhere in this music section and you get those controls. It's peculiar that this Control Center section is the only one that has an icon to help you find more options —and works without it.
There are also hidden options on the Torch icon. Press and hold on that to get an extra control for specifying how bright the torch light should be.
Similarly, the Brightness control looks like a simple slider but if you press and hold, it also gives you an option to control iOS 11's Night Shift.
Then if you press and hold on the Camera icon, you get options for common camera features. With the Timer button, you can have a fast and rather visual way to set a timer for between 1 minute and 2 hours.
In comparison, the calculator, the Do Not Disturb feature and the rotation lock don't do anything extra. There's no way to know that without trying, so we did.
These are the options you get by default with Control Center —but not only can you change them, they can be changed for you. If you remove Apple's Camera app from your iPhone, for instance, then it's not available in Control Center.
That makes sense except for two things. First, there's no information that it's happened: the Camera just vanishes from the screen and also from a list of apps that can be added to Control Center.
Then, second, if you remove, say, the Apple TV Remote app, there's no difference. It stays in Control Center and works exactly as it did. Again, there's no way to know what will or won't vanish, not unless you try everything. We didn't.
You can't tell the connectivity section of Control Center that you'd rather have a button for AirDrop instead of Bluetooth. What you can do, though, is add or remove to the bottom section of the screen.
Connectivity, audio, lock rotation, Do Not Disturb, Screen Mirroring, Brightness, and Volume all remain no matter what. Except if you plug in a Lightning cable then it's possible that Screen Mirroring will change to the words Docked Connection. Otherwise, these are set forever.
Everything beneath that, though, is up to you.
To customize what you get in Control Center or to just see what's available to you, come out of it and go to your iPhone's Settings.
It's surprising that you can't edit or otherwise change what's in Control Center while you're actually in it but presumably that's a security issue. Since you can swipe into Control Center without unlocking your phone, this limits what you can change.
Still, it's a pain because going to Settings, Control Center, to make changes means you can't see their effect until you go back.
The first screen you get offers the option to allow or not allow Control Center access when you're in an app. If this is off then you have to come out to the home screen before you can swipe into Control Center.
If it's on, then you can swipe in regardless of what you're doing on the phone —in theory. In practice, certain apps still don't allow Control Center, such as Apple Maps during navigation.
Tap on Customize Controls and you get two lists on screen. They'll vary depending on whether you've customized before, on what apps you happen to have and potentially which phone.
However, there will always be a list headed Include which contains everything that is represented in Control Center. There's a red delete option next to each of them and grab handles for moving them up and down this list.
If you press the delete button, you're asked to confirm you want to remove the item and then it goes down to the second list. This is headed More Controls and here each line has a green add icon next to it.
Tap on any you want and they go up to the Include list where you can alter their position.
![Control Control](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125839768/717475982.png)
You're moving controls up and down a list on this screen but that translates to them being moved along or sideways on the actual Control Center.
This means you will end up swiping in and out of Control Center while you adjust where the controls go.
Take that time. Think about where controls go and also about which ones you will actually use. There's no Add All feature but there's also nothing stopping you adding every single control if you want to.
You'll just end up with a scrolling Control Center screen which reduces the benefit of being able to rapidly swipe in and tap what you need.
How do you troubleshoot AirDrop if it's not working on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac? Note: Control Center no longer turns Wi-Fi or Bluetooth completely off. It simply stops the current connection but leaves things like AirPods, Apple Why does my Nintendo Switch dock show a blinking green light?
The Control Center, in essence, is no longer a single card stocked with all of the expected iOS features you've become used to seeing (like the flashlight, calculator, and timer) — it's now a sliding collection of three panels. The first is a basic launchpad of settings like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the second is dedicated to Apple Music, and the third houses your favorite accessories from Apple's new HomeKit-focused app 'Home.'
Some of these shuffled-around buttons can make Control Center in iOS 10 a bit discombobulating when you first bring it up, so follow this guide to get a general impression of how to use Control Center, and how to find your favorite features that may not be where they were before.
Navigating Control Center in iOS 10
From anywhere in iOS 10 (including the main lock screen), swipe up from the bottom of the iPhone to bring up Control Center. The landing tab of Control Center mirrors a lot of the features from iOS 9 and prior versions of iOS, because it's there you'll find Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb, and Portrait Orientation Lock buttons lined up along the top of the tab, all sitting above the brightness toggle.
The second row of buttons brings the first major Control Center change in iOS 10: two medium-sized squares for AirPlay Mirroring and AirDrop, whose locations have been flipped this time around. AirPlay Mirroring lets you mirror your iPhone screen on a connected Apple TV, while the AirDrop button lets you toggle between 'Receiving Off,' 'Contacts Only,' and 'Everyone' for Apple's media sharing tool.
Night Shift has its own dedicated row, so you can enable or disable the feature before its scheduled on/off times — in iOS 9 it was a small icon between timer and calculator. Lastly, at the bottom of the first Control Center tray, you'll find the Flashlight, Timer, Calculator, and Camera, unchanged from iOS 9. New, however, are 3D Touch shortcuts for each app: the Flashlight can change intensity, Timer includes common interval options, Calculator lets you copy the last result, and Camera has multiple picture options.
Controlling Music
While in the first panel of Control Center, swipe left to switch over to the Apple Music panel. With the iOS 10 update, Apple has moved music playback and volume controls into its own separate panel. The change will undoubtedly be a hassle for many iOS users who listen to music regularly, but with a dedicated section of Control Center a few of the controls have been enlarged and a new feature has been added.
After starting a song in Apple Music, the new panel will come alive with the currently playing track, name of the artist and album, and scrub controls to jump to any section of the song. You can tap on any of these text readouts, and even the album artwork, to jump into the full Apple Music app. In addition to basic play, pause, rewind, and fast-forward buttons, and a volume toggle, Apple has introduced a new broadcast feature in Control Center as well.
The button is located all the way at the bottom of the Apple Music section, and should default to 'iPhone,' so tap on it to see a list of potential devices you can connect to in order to expand the listening capabilities of the current track to a larger group. These devices could include any Bluetooth speaker within range that you've already set up via Settings, or a 3rd or 4th generation Apple TV. Choose whichever output you prefer to transfer playback to, and you can reset the iPhone as default by returning to Control Center, or simply powering down the connected device.
Controlling Home
If you plan on using Apple's new HomeKit app 'Home,' the third panel of Control Center should prove useful. Once synced up with any compatible HomeKit accessories in the main app, you can swipe left twice from the Control Center launchpad to gain a few basic controls over your smart light bulbs, thermostat, and more.
Before you get started in Control Center, make sure you have your accessories installed in Home. On the main screen in the app, tap 'Edit' in the top right corner to rearrange your favorite accessories, the top nine of which will appear in Control Center. You can follow the same process to prioritize your favorite scenes to activate in Control Center.
Within its section of Control Center, Home's actions are straightforward: you can tap each accessory to either turn it on or off, depending on its current state. More useful is a clever 3D Touch gesture that brings up a brightness toggle that allows for incremental percentage control of a connected lightbulb such as Hue, for example. Tap 'Color' at the bottom of this screen to dive into a dynamic color wheel to pick six preset color options, or edit one to jump into a rainbow color selector to truly customize your lights within Control Center.
A 'Temperature' wheel further lets you choose from brighter blue light or softer orange light. Although not automatic, this option is similar to Night Shift, letting you generate softer light at night to encourage better sleep. You can tap any empty space in these 3D Touch menus to return to Control Center.
To get a glimpse of your favorite scenes — which are grouped collections of HomeKit accessories — tap the 'Scenes' button in the top right of Control Center's third panel. Here you'll see your top eight favorite scenes, which offer similar on/off controls for each scene, but without any expanded 3D Touch support. Tap 'Accessories' to return to the favorite accessories tab.
iOS 10 is full of new features that you'll find when you start playing around with the software update. Keep checking back with MacRumors for more helpful how-tos on everything from creating and sending handwritten text messages to avoiding tolls in Apple Maps to using lyrics in Apple Music and more.
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Tips
By William Gallagher
Wednesday, August 22, 2018, 11:20 am PT (02:20 pm ET)
It's meant to be simple: you swipe to get some common controls for your iPhone or iPad. However, you can change what's there, you can get more fine control and you can even lose an option if you're not careful. AppleInsider swipes up, down and around.Wednesday, August 22, 2018, 11:20 am PT (02:20 pm ET)
It's right there on your iPhone —but many people don't even know its name. Yet once you get in the habit of swiping into Control Center, it's a feature that will save you time, and one that you can can make even more useful by customizing extensively.
September sees the fifth anniversary of Control Center on iPhones and iPads. It was introduced with iOS 7 in 2013, and has changed and evolved since then —but the primary function remains the same.
Since iOS 11, Control Center has been a single pane that you swipe to call up and swipe to dismiss. Right now you swipe in different places depending on which iPhone you have, though.
For the iPhone X, you need to swipe from the top right hand corner downwards to summon it. Then swipe up to dismiss it. For all other iPhones, at least at the moment, you swipe up from the bottom to call and swipe down to close it again.
You can expect this to change, though. Currently the beta for iOS 12 has moved the swipe on the iPad to match the iPhone X gesture. That might be a clue that new iPads are coming with similar designs to the iPhone X, but in any case the odds are that Apple will eventually make the swipe consistent across all devices.
By default, the Control Center contains 11 options with many arranged into panels. At top left there is one for connectivity which is in theory a handy place to switch off WiFi, Bluetooth and any mobile data connection.
Switch off Bluetooth and more
Only, it doesn't do quite what you expect. If you tap to switch off Bluetooth then it disconnects any current connections but doesn't completely disable the feature.
Similarly, tapping on WiFi will drop your current connections but it won't actually switch off WiFi.
It's so that your phone can continue to use features such as AirDrop between devices. It's so that the phone can communicate with Apple Pencil and Apple Watch.
If you don't want that and also don't want your battery being drained by them, tap the Airplane Mode button. That at least switches off WiFi and Mobile Data. To also switch off Bluetooth, you'll have to go into your iPhone's Settings.
Hard press on this connectivity section to get more options. This works whether you have an iPhone that supports 3D Touch or not: you can press and hold for a moment to get the extras.
It seems to defeat the purpose of Control Center to have options that are hidden away but when you open these up, you see six controls. Four are as you've seen them on the main Control Center but then there are extras for Personal Hotspot and for AirDrop.
This is where you can set who is allowed to automatically AirDrop items to you. That's convenient but you'd never know it was there unless you pressed.
More hidden options
Maybe you use Personal Hotspot regularly but the odds are that you use music more. Which means that hiding a feature in this section is more of a pain.
To be fair, it's less hidden and more misdirection. The music section of Control Center contains a small icon at top right that's like a radio signal. Once you've seen that, you can tap on it to get control over what speaker the audio comes from —the iPhone's own one, headphones or nearby HomePod for instance —plus what the volume is.
Only, force press or press-and-hold anywhere in this music section and you get those controls. It's peculiar that this Control Center section is the only one that has an icon to help you find more options —and works without it.
There are also hidden options on the Torch icon. Press and hold on that to get an extra control for specifying how bright the torch light should be.
Similarly, the Brightness control looks like a simple slider but if you press and hold, it also gives you an option to control iOS 11's Night Shift.
Then if you press and hold on the Camera icon, you get options for common camera features. With the Timer button, you can have a fast and rather visual way to set a timer for between 1 minute and 2 hours.
In comparison, the calculator, the Do Not Disturb feature and the rotation lock don't do anything extra. There's no way to know that without trying, so we did.
Your mileage may vary
These are the options you get by default with Control Center —but not only can you change them, they can be changed for you. If you remove Apple's Camera app from your iPhone, for instance, then it's not available in Control Center.
That makes sense except for two things. First, there's no information that it's happened: the Camera just vanishes from the screen and also from a list of apps that can be added to Control Center.
Then, second, if you remove, say, the Apple TV Remote app, there's no difference. It stays in Control Center and works exactly as it did. Again, there's no way to know what will or won't vanish, not unless you try everything. We didn't.
Customizing what you need
You can't tell the connectivity section of Control Center that you'd rather have a button for AirDrop instead of Bluetooth. What you can do, though, is add or remove to the bottom section of the screen.
Connectivity, audio, lock rotation, Do Not Disturb, Screen Mirroring, Brightness, and Volume all remain no matter what. Except if you plug in a Lightning cable then it's possible that Screen Mirroring will change to the words Docked Connection. Otherwise, these are set forever.
Everything beneath that, though, is up to you.
To customize what you get in Control Center or to just see what's available to you, come out of it and go to your iPhone's Settings.
It's surprising that you can't edit or otherwise change what's in Control Center while you're actually in it but presumably that's a security issue. Since you can swipe into Control Center without unlocking your phone, this limits what you can change.
Still, it's a pain because going to Settings, Control Center, to make changes means you can't see their effect until you go back.
The first screen you get offers the option to allow or not allow Control Center access when you're in an app. If this is off then you have to come out to the home screen before you can swipe into Control Center.
If it's on, then you can swipe in regardless of what you're doing on the phone —in theory. In practice, certain apps still don't allow Control Center, such as Apple Maps during navigation.
Tap on Customize Controls and you get two lists on screen. They'll vary depending on whether you've customized before, on what apps you happen to have and potentially which phone.
However, there will always be a list headed Include which contains everything that is represented in Control Center. There's a red delete option next to each of them and grab handles for moving them up and down this list.
If you press the delete button, you're asked to confirm you want to remove the item and then it goes down to the second list. This is headed More Controls and here each line has a green add icon next to it.
Tap on any you want and they go up to the Include list where you can alter their position.
![Control Control](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125839768/717475982.png)
Counterintuitive
You're moving controls up and down a list on this screen but that translates to them being moved along or sideways on the actual Control Center.
This means you will end up swiping in and out of Control Center while you adjust where the controls go.
Take that time. Think about where controls go and also about which ones you will actually use. There's no Add All feature but there's also nothing stopping you adding every single control if you want to.
You'll just end up with a scrolling Control Center screen which reduces the benefit of being able to rapidly swipe in and tap what you need.