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How to use your iPhone as a magnifying glass to read small print

Your iPhone already has a magnifier built in, and it's free. Here is how to find it, where it falls short, and how to spot the apps that quietly charge more than $500 a year for the same thing.

Updated 29 July 2026

Start with the free one: Apple's Magnifier

Before you install anything, know this: every iPhone since the iPhone 6 has a Magnifier built into iOS. It costs nothing, it works offline, and for many people it is enough. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

How to open it

Swipe down from the top-right corner to open Control Centre, then look for the magnifying glass icon. If it isn't there, tap the + to add Magnifier to your controls.
Or ask Siri: "Open Magnifier."
Or set up a shortcut: Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut → Magnifier. You can then open it by triple-clicking the side button.

Once it's open, drag the slider to zoom, tap the torch icon to light up what you're looking at, and tap the shutter button to freeze the image so you can study it without your hands shaking.

What it does well

Magnifies, with the torch on at the same time
Freezes the image — the single most useful feature for anyone whose hands are not perfectly steady
Colour filters that boost contrast for low vision
Costs nothing, ever

Where it falls short

Not in what it does, but in how it asks you to work:

It is buried in Accessibility settings, and most people never discover it exists.
Its toolbar is a row of small unlabelled icons. If you don't already know what a triangle inside a circle means, you have to tap things and find out.
The controls are small — which is an odd choice for a tool aimed at people who cannot see small things.
It magnifies, but it does not read the text to you.

If you are comfortable with your iPhone, try Apple's Magnifier first. Genuinely. If you find it and it suits you, you need nothing else.

The other kind of magnifier app

Search "magnifier" in the App Store and you will find dozens of results. A good number of them work on the same model:

A weekly subscription, shown in small type — $9.99 a week is common, which is over $500 a year for magnifying text.
A full-screen advert every fifteen seconds, or a paywall that appears before you have seen the app do anything at all.
A close button on the paywall that is grey, tiny, and appears after a delay.
A cancellation route that is nowhere in the app.

Why this happens to this category in particular. A magnifier app is, by definition, used by people who have trouble reading small text. A price written in small text is therefore harder for them to check than for anyone else. That is not an accident of design — it is the business model. Reading the price before you subscribe is the whole defence, and it is exactly what these apps make difficult.

How to check before you tap

On the App Store listing, scroll to In-App Purchases. The real prices are listed there, at a readable size, before you install anything.
Read the one-star reviews first. Billing complaints show up there long before they show up anywhere else.
Once installed, check Settings → your name → Subscriptions to see exactly what you have signed up to, and cancel in two taps if it isn't what you thought.

The thing neither of them does: reading out loud

Magnifying helps when the text is small. It doesn't help when the contrast is poor, the paper is glossy, or the print is grey on white — which describes most medicine leaflets.

Every iPhone can recognise text in a photograph and speak it aloud. Both technologies are built into iOS, both work without an internet connection, and neither sends your photograph anywhere. What is usually missing is a way to reach them in two taps rather than five.

That is the gap Easy Magnifier was written to fill: magnify, light, freeze, and then listen — with three buttons big enough to hit without looking, and no setting to configure.

Our own prices, in full, since that is the point of this article.
Easy Magnifier costs one yearly price after a 3-day free trial. No weekly subscription, no adverts, no hidden plan. The price is shown at full size before you commit to anything, and the app sends you a reminder the day before the trial ends so nobody is charged by surprise. Cancelling takes two taps in Settings.

See Easy Magnifier on the App Store

In short

Try Apple's free Magnifier first. Control Centre, or triple-click the side button. If it suits you, stop there.
Never subscribe without reading the In-App Purchases section of the App Store listing. A weekly price is the warning sign.
If magnifying isn't enough, look for an app that reads text out loud — and one that shows you its price in a size you can read.

Easy Magnifier is a visual aid for everyday comfort. It is not a medical device and replaces neither prescription glasses nor advice from an eye care professional.