My mom has had an iPhone for six years. Last week I watched her manually type out her email address into every login form. One letter at a time. When I showed her text replacement shortcuts, she looked at me like I had performed magic. “Why did nobody tell me this?” she asked. Good question.

Here are the features that actually save time — not the gimmicky ones.

Text Replacement Shortcuts

Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement. Create shortcuts like “@@” → your full email address or “eml” → your entire email. Every time you type the shortcut, it expands to the full text. I have about fifteen of these set up and they save me probably ten minutes a day of repetitive typing.

Back Tap

Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap. Double-tap or triple-tap the back of your phone to trigger any action — take a screenshot, open the camera, turn on the flashlight, run a shortcut. I have double-tap set to screenshot and triple-tap set to Shazam. It works through most cases. Not through thick OtterBox-style cases, but standard cases are fine.

Scan Documents Without an App

Open the Notes app. Create a new note. Tap the camera icon. Tap “Scan Documents.” The built-in scanner is as good as any third-party app I have tried. It auto-detects edges, corrects perspective, and saves as PDF. I have not used a separate scanning app in two years.

Hidden Trackpad on the Keyboard

Hold the spacebar. The keyboard turns into a trackpad. Slide your finger to move the cursor precisely instead of stabbing at the screen trying to place it between two letters. This alone is worth knowing. Once you use it you cannot go back to cursor-stabbing.

Quick Video Scrubbing

In the Photos app, when playing a video, hold your finger on the playhead and slide up or down to change the scrubbing speed from fine to coarse. Slow drag for precision, fast drag to skip ahead. Nobody tells you about this one.

Five features. All free. All built in. Share them with your mom.