Apple’s announcement last week that the Action Button is now on all of its iPhone 16 models, rather than just the Pro model that the button debuted on last year, was a little overshadowed by the introduction of the Camera Control button — a capacitive, tactile button for launching and controlling the iPhone 16’s camera. But don’t let that fool you: the Action Button is still one of the most powerful features Apple has added to its phones in years.
One very obvious use of the button is to connect it to the iPhone’s camera app, letting you press and hold to open the app, then press once more to take a picture. But does that mean the Camera Control button has made it obsolete? I don’t think so.
By default, the Action Button serves as a mute toggle — it did replace the mute switch, after all — that you press and hold to mute or unmute your phone. But besides that and using the camera, it can do so much more. To begin with, you can set it to do simple things (by using Settings > Action Button), like flick on the flashlight (or the torch, if you like), set a Focus Mode, or open Apple’s Translate app. With iOS 18, Apple added the ability to map it to a Control Center action or recognize a song with Shazam.
But you can go way beyond simple. For me, it’s a way to help me use my phone less. I don’t mean spend fewer hours on it — I mean it lets me cut out all the extraneous swiping and tapping that I have to do to carry things out on my phone. It’s something I’d been trying to figure out through other means, like adding Shortcuts to my homescreen, but the Action Button has been the missing part of a puzzle I’d been piecing together for years.
Now I use the button several times a day: long-pressing it to get to an option that turns all the lights off before I go to bed; selecting multiple AirPlay speakers at once in an easy-to-use menu format that waits for me to finish choosing before it streams my audio to them; connecting to my AirPods when Apple’s auto-switching feature (all too frequently) doesn’t work right.