Today I learned the iPhone trick to quickly select multiple items

I almost feel silly writing this but…did anyone else know that there is a built-in gesture to select messages, emails, notes in bulk, and more across Apple stock apps? Instead of using a submenu to put items into “select” mode and then decide which circles appear in each row, you can just swipe two fingers down the list to select each item in the list that your fingers touch.

If you already know this feature, feel free to stop reading here, but I and many of my colleagues at Verge only learned about it when Jordan Morgan tweeted To complain that more third-party apps have to take advantage of it. So even though it’s a feature available to all apps on iOS and iPadOS, you’ll primarily find it in Apple’s stock apps. It appears to be available in Messages, Mail, Notes, and Reminders from digging around, but there’s almost certainly a lot more.

One Apple app that I really wish I could take advantage of is Clock, as it’s probably a very easy way to pick out all those old alarms you no longer need and delete them in one fell swoop. Obviously, it would be nice to see it used via more third-party apps like Gmail and WhatsApp (but it’s not).

Hidden features like this are interesting to me because they reveal how Apple software can struggle to reveal its more advanced features to users over time, despite the company’s attempt to make it as intuitive as possible. This is especially evident with iPadOS. my ex-boyfriend Dieter Bohn wrote at length About all the extra parts of laptop-like functionality that most users can easily overlook.