There is a setting buried in your iPhone that lets you move a pointer around the screen, open apps, scroll and go back to the Home Screen without touching the glass once. Not with your voice. With your eyes.
It is called Eye Tracking, it has been sitting in the Accessibility menu since iOS 18 landed in 2024, and it works on any iPhone 12 or newer, including the third generation iPhone SE. There is no app to install, no subscription, and no accessory. The front camera and a machine learning model already on your phone do all of it.
Most people have never switched it on. That is a shame for two very different groups: the people who need it, and the people who would simply enjoy watching it work.
The short version
- Settings, Accessibility, Eye Tracking, then flip the toggle at the top
- Calibration asks you to follow a dot around roughly eleven points on screen. It takes seconds
- Dwell Control switches on with it. Hold your gaze on something for a moment and it counts as a tap
- Everything runs on device. Apple states the camera data used to set up and drive the feature never leaves the phone
- Prop the phone on something solid, about a foot and a half away, with light on your face and a clean front camera
- If your head moves more than your eyes do, Head Tracking is the better feature, and it can read facial expressions as commands
Who this is actually built for
It is tempting to file Eye Tracking under party trick. It is not one. For someone with a spinal cord injury, advanced ALS, severe arthritis or any condition that makes touching a screen unreliable or painful, a phone that responds to a glance is the difference between an independent device and a device somebody else has to operate for you.
Dedicated eye tracking hardware exists and it is very good. It also costs thousands of dollars, needs mounting, and usually attaches to a computer rather than a phone. Apple’s version is not as precise as a medical grade tracker. It is, however, free, already in your pocket, and it works with the same apps everyone else uses.
The secondary audience is everyone else. If you cook with your hands covered in flour, work with gloves on, or spend a lot of time with the phone propped on a stand, it is a genuinely useful second input method rather than a novelty.
Before you start: the conditions that decide whether it works
Eye Tracking is a camera feature, and camera features live and die on framing and light. Apple’s own guidance is specific, and people who skip it usually conclude the feature is broken when it is simply badly set up.
| Condition | What to do |
|---|---|
| Distance | Around a foot and a half from your face. Much closer and the camera loses the full eye, much further and small movements stop registering |
| Stability | Put the phone on a stand, a table or anything that does not move. Handheld tracking drifts because the phone moves with your hand |
| Lighting | Even light on your face. Avoid sitting with a bright window directly behind you |
| Camera | Wipe the front camera. A smudge that barely affects a selfie will wreck gaze estimation |
| Glasses | Usually fine. Heavy reflections or very dark tints are the failure case, so angle the phone slightly to kill the glare |
| Hardware | iPhone 12 or later, or the third generation iPhone SE, running iOS 18 or newer |
Setting it up, step by step
| Step | What to tap | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Open Settings, then Accessibility | The whole physical and motor control menu lives here |
| 2 | Scroll to Eye Tracking under Physical and Motor | If it is missing, your iPhone is older than the iPhone 12 |
| 3 | Toggle Eye Tracking on | A camera preview of your face appears with framing guidance |
| 4 | Position the phone as the preview asks | Get this right once and you will not have to think about it again |
| 5 | Follow the dot through calibration | Around eleven points, a couple of seconds each. Move your eyes, not your head |
| 6 | Look at something and hold | A pointer follows your gaze. Dwell on a target and it selects |
Calibration is the step people rush. If you turn your head to chase the dot instead of moving your eyes, the model learns the wrong relationship between your face and your gaze, and everything afterwards feels sticky. It is worth redoing if the pointer never quite settles where you are looking.
Dwell Control is the part that makes it usable
A pointer that follows your eyes is interesting. A pointer that can click is a working input device, and that is Dwell Control’s job. Rest your gaze on a button and a small progress indicator fills. When it completes, the tap fires.
It also carries more than a simple tap. Through the associated menu you get scrolling, access to Control Center and Notification Center, the hardware buttons, Siri, and a pause option so you can look around the screen without accidentally triggering things. That pause is the one to learn first, because the most common complaint from new users is that everything they read gets clicked.
That last point matters more than it sounds. A feature that streams your face to a data center in order to guess where you are looking would be a genuinely alarming thing to enable. This one does not, which is the same architectural choice Apple has been making across its on device machine learning. If you want to see what does leave your phone when a feature is not local, the Apple Intelligence report is a useful counterpoint, and we walked through it in the log of everything Siri sends to Apple’s servers.
Head Tracking is often the better option
Eye Tracking is not the only hands free pointer on the phone, and for a lot of people it is not the best one. Head Tracking moves the pointer with the orientation of your head rather than the direction of your gaze, and it adds something Eye Tracking does not have: facial expressions as triggers.
| Eye Tracking | Head Tracking | |
|---|---|---|
| Moves the pointer with | Where you look | How you turn your head |
| Selection method | Dwell Control, a held gaze | Dwell, plus assignable facial expressions |
| Expression triggers | No | Blink, open mouth, scrunch nose, stick out tongue |
| Best for | Limited head or neck movement | Good head control, fine motor difficulty |
| Tolerance for drift | Lower. Recalibrate if it wanders | Higher. Bigger movements, coarser targets |
Assigning an action to sticking your tongue out sounds like a joke until you watch someone use it to answer a call with both hands occupied. The expressions are deliberately exaggerated so the model does not fire on a yawn.
The rest of the Accessibility menu is worth ten minutes
Eye Tracking is the headline, but the folder it lives in is the most underused part of iOS. A few that regularly surprise people:
- Vehicle Motion Cues puts drifting dots at the edges of the screen that match the car’s movement, which reduces motion sickness when you read in a moving vehicle. Android only shipped its own version this year, which we compared in Android’s motion assist and the Apple feature that beat it by two years
- Back Tap turns a double or triple tap on the back of the phone into a shortcut, screenshot or any action you like
- Sound Recognition listens for smoke alarms, doorbells, running water and crying babies, then notifies you
- VoiceOver narrates the interface, and it has quietly become good enough that sighted users borrow it for hands free reading
- Guided Access locks the phone to one app, which is the fastest way to hand a device to a child without losing your messages
What to expect the first time
Be realistic. After a good calibration, Eye Tracking is accurate enough for large buttons, app icons and scrolling, and frustrating on dense interfaces with small targets. Text selection is hard work. Typing is possible and slow.
Battery use is noticeable because the front camera and a model are running continuously, so this is not a feature to leave on all day out of curiosity. And it is worth knowing that Apple keeps the actual mechanics of Siri and system features moving between releases, which is why a menu you remember from last year sometimes lands somewhere new. The Siri situation in particular has been in flux all year, something we unpacked in why installing iOS 27 does not automatically get you the new Siri.
None of that undercuts the point. A mainstream phone shipping a competent eye tracker as a free, private, on device feature is genuinely remarkable, and the only real barrier left is that almost nobody knows the menu exists.
Sources and further reading
- UNILAD Tech: Your iPhone has a built in eye tracker that turns your gaze into a mouse pointer
- Apple Support: Control iPhone with the movement of your eyes
- 9to5Mac: How to turn on iPhone Eye Tracking
- AbilityNet: How to control your device using eye tracking
- Apple Support: Accessibility features on iPhone
