The Action Button as introduced on the iPhone 15 Pro
The new iPhone 16e moves Visual Intelligence to the Action Button, making that immediately more useful and also giving faint hope that the button will be improved further.
Apple’s Action Button was first introduced on the original Apple Watch Ultra, where users could decide what it would actually do when pressed. It’s a function button, really, and it worked the same when it then came to the iPhone 15 Pro.
Now it’s come to the iPhone 16e, and it’s a little different. You still have to press and hold before it does anything, and the Action Button can still only do one of a series of actions that you choose.
It’s just that this list of optional actions has added Visual Intelligence. On every other iPhone 16, Visual Intelligence is tied to the Camera Control button, but there is no such button on the iPhone 16e, and it had to go somewhere.
That could mean that Apple has made Visual Intelligence inconsistent between devices. At present, Visual Intelligence has not been added as an Action Button option for other iPhone 16 models.
Given that the iPhone 16e doesn’t have the Camera Control button, though, moving Visual Intelligence to the Action Button is clever.
Since Visual Intelligence uses the camera, there is a logic to it being part of the Camera Control. But for functionality, having it on the Action Button is handy.
With every other iPhone 16, you have to get used to pressing Camera Control for just long enough to get Visual Intelligence, and to not just take a photo. With the Action Button on the iPhone 16e, you can go straight to Visual Intelligence.
Action Button delays
Or rather, you don’t actually go straight to Visual Intelligence or any other possible Action Button function. That’s because you can’t just press the button and be done with it, you instead have to press and hold the button down.
Apple gives us a button that is for quick access to functions, but builds in a delay to stop us getting too excited. It is an artificial delay, too, because a regular single press is registered, it just makes a message pop up saying “Hold for ‘iPhone Action Button’.”
L-R: You can choose Action Button from Settings, then select Shortcut, and then pick an existing Shortcut to run
It’s also still frustrating that the Action Button replaced the mute switch. Pre-iPhone, it was absurdly difficult to find a mute option on a phone, and then the iPhone just gave us a switch right there on the side.
You didn’t even have to look at the phone to do that, you just felt where the switch was. Now with the Action Button, you still don’t have to look, but you might as well since you can’t do anything else until your press is registered.
More than one action
That said, you can actually turn the Action Button back into a mute switch. It’s just that, without fiddling, if you do this, then a mute switch is all you’ve got.
You have to decide on one action, whether that’s mute or a handful of other options, now including Visual Intelligence. There are ways to make the Action Button do more, or to do something different depending on your location when you press it.
But that requires telling the Action Button to run a Shortcut. And that means learning Shortcuts.
So Apple has given us a simple way to start iPhone features, but made it more complicated to do so usefully.
Consequently, adding Visual Intelligence to the Action Button on the iPhone 16e could go either way. It arguably means just that Apple has loaded the button with one more option.
But it could mean that Apple is reconsidering how the buttons work. The ideal would be to abandon the “Hold for ‘iPhone Action Button'” nonsense and instead offer one function when pressed, and another when held.
You know, just like how the Camera Control button works.
