Your iPhone's built-in magnifier does way more than help you see the fine print - how to use it

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Forgetting your glasses or finding yourself squinting at the minuscule text on the back of a medicine bottle or a food box can be frustrating. But if you have an iPhone , as they used to say, there's an app for that: You can use the built-in Magnifier app to immediately zoom in on tiny print, whether you're up close or far away. It's a super useful tool. (If you have an Android phone, there's a similar Google Magnifier app available.)

The Magnifier app comes preinstalled on your iPhone. The easiest way to find it is to swipe down to access your search bar, and start typing in "Magnifier." The icon is a black square with a gray magnifying glass.

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The feature has been included as an accessibility tool on the iPhone and iPad since 2016, and became its own app in 2020, with iOS 14. As of last year, it's also available on MacOS.

And no, it's not the same as zooming in the Camera app: Open it, and move the yellow dot to the left or right to make whatever is in view smaller or larger. That's it. It's simple and effective. But if you need more than just magnification, there are a ton of customizations, too.

If you need more help beyond the zoom in or out, Magifier has several other useful accessibility features. For example, hit Capture to take a photo of the text, and the option for Reader will appear at the bottom right of the screen. Tap it, and you'll see a transcript of the words on the page in plain text, and the option to hit "play" to read it aloud.

You can also use Capture to share or save the image.

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Another useful setting to add is Detect. When you open Magifier, tap Settings in the bottom right corner. You'll see that Activities and Capture are set as Shown, but Detect is set as Hidden. Tap Detect, and toggle Show in Control Panel on. Now, you'll see Detect as an option at the bottom of the screen.

Press and hold Detect, and you'll see options for voice-to-text to describe Scenes, Text, or Point & Speak. If you turn on Text, and hit Detect, your phone will start reading the text aloud automatically. If you turn on Scenes, the app will describe what's happening on your phone screen.