Stop clicking through menus: Settings has a search bar

"Where in this phone do you turn off…" is a sentence that kicks off a lot of lost minutes. Settings on a modern phone spans hundreds of screens, and every Android manufacturer rearranges them their own way — what's under System on a Pixel is under General Management on a Samsung. Clicking your way through is a gamble. Yet both Settings apps have a search field at the top that drops you directly on the right screen, whatever it's called and wherever it's hiding.

How to do it

1. iPhone: open Settings and pull down — a search field slides out at the top. Type what you're looking for: "hotspot," "dictation," "notifications" — the results lead straight to the specific option.
2. Android: open Settings and tap the magnifying glass, or straight into the field at the top. Suggestions appear after just a couple of letters, and results even show the full path to the option — so you incidentally learn where it lives.
3. Type what you want to do, not where you think it is: "vibration," "keyboard language," "screen mirroring," "default browser." Search covers option names and their synonyms too.
4. An even faster entry point: on iPhone, Settings options also turn up in system search via pull-down on the home screen; on Android, search in the app drawer or the Google widget.
5. If a result doesn't lead exactly where you want, try a different word — "mobile data" instead of "internet," "sound" instead of "volume."

A typical scenario

You're in a meeting and need to quickly share internet access with a colleague. You last turned on the hotspot six months ago, and an update since then rearranged the menu. Instead of digging through Connections/Network/Sharing sections, you type "hotspot" into search and land on the right screen in three seconds. The same relief happens when you call your parents to help with their phone: you don't need to know their menu layout, just tell them what to type into search.

What you get out of it

You stop needing to memorize menu maps — knowledge that goes stale with every update anyway and doesn't transfer between brands. A setting that used to take minutes to find now takes seconds, even on an unfamiliar phone. This is the biggest win specifically when helping someone else: instructions like "third section from the top, maybe the fourth" get replaced by the universal "just type it into search," which always works.

Pro tip

Search is also the fastest route to settings you visit repeatedly but that are buried deep — app location permissions, or storage management, say. And when even search doesn't help because you don't know what the feature is called, describe to an AI assistant what you want to accomplish and what phone you have — it'll give you the exact option name to type into search.