Do you know that your iPhone has a secret keyboard but apparently you can’t use it!
Ever wondered if you could type messages or emails on iPhone using only one hand? And, with the kind of plus-sized iPhones available in the market, typing with one hand becomes a nearly impossible task. Well, maybe not anymore.
Developer Steve Troughton-Smith, a well-known hacker and game developer, recently discovered hidden code for a one-handed keyboard in iOS that pushes the keyboard to the side; either the left or right, depending on your preference. Apparently, it can be activated with an edge swipe.
Steve Troughton-Smith, who discovered it using Apple’s iOS Simulator tool, said that the iPhone has had a secret one-handed keyboard since iOS 8 but has never activated it.
Today’s fun hack (been there since at least iOS 8); the iOS keyboard has an unused left/right one-handed mode. Activated by edge-swipe pic.twitter.com/zIk7x7CVmu
— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) October 19, 2016
Looking at the screenshots he tweeted, the special keyboard resembles many other one-handed keyboards: Smushing the keyboard to either the left or right side and filing in the extra space with useful shortcuts buttons for things like cut and paste. Check out the keyboard in action below:
However, the only disadvantage is that you can’t use the functionality on your iPhone just yet. As Troughton-Smith says, activating the one-handed keyboard would require you to jailbreak your device’s operating system, which may not be the right thing to do.
The recent discovery of this unreleased feature doesn’t essentially mean Apple will announce it anytime soon. But, the developer has added some pointers on how to activate the feature here, if your iPhone is jailbroken.
