Your iPhone volume buttons' nifty, hidden features

What do you use your phone's volume buttons for? 

Nowadays, phone buttons are no longer limited to doing only one thing, and the volume rockers on your phone are no different. 

If you have been using the volume buttons of your iPhone for its most obvious purpose, you are missing out on a lot. Here are some of the ways to use them for more than just music. 

Snooze or turn off alarms

Snoozing an alarm without opening your eyes in the morning can be troublesome. Lucky for you, you can just press one of the volume buttons when an alarm rings to snooze it instantly. 

This is a much better way than opening your eyes only to get flashed by the bright display, look for the snooze button and get an early morning headache in the process.

Pressing one of the volume buttons will also turn off the alarm if you toggle off the "Snooze" option when you set the alarm. 

Call emergency services

In an emergency, holding either of the volume buttons and the power button together will show your iPhone's "Emergency Call" slider. Swiping the slider will instantly call the emergency services of the country you are in. 

For Bangladesh, your iPhone will call 999. For the US, it will automatically call 911. 

After the emergency call ends, the phone will automatically start calling emergency contacts after ten seconds, which can be cancelled if it is not necessary. After all calls have ended, the phone will show the emergency Medical ID with your blood group, emergency contact numbers, allergies and other info, if you set them beforehand. 

Temporarily turning off Face ID

You can also temporarily disable FaceID following the same procedure.

As mentioned earlier, pressing and holding the lock button and either of the volume buttons for two seconds will bring the Emergency Call slider. Pressing the lock button immediately will tell your phone that you want to unlock it with your PIN only. The same works for older iPhones with Touch ID as well.  

Use as the shutter button

This is a well known feature that is also  present in most Android phones. This gives you a dedicated shutter button on your iPhone to capture photos more comfortably without having to tap the display. 

When in the camera app, you can just tap the shutter button to take a quick shot. It works with every photo mode, no matter whether you are using the rear or front camera of your iPhone. You can also use the buttons to start recording a video and press again to stop recording. 

While a single press only takes one photo, holding the Volume Up button will take photo bursts. But you must enable "Use Volume Up for Burst" in Settings > Camera before doing it.

Silence an incoming call

All you need to do to silence an incoming call ring instantly is to press either of the volume buttons.