Did You Know There’s a Better Way to Select Items on Your iPhone?

Your iPhone is full of hidden controls and features you may or may not have stumbled upon over the years. Apple doesn’t really pack a traditional user manual with each iPhone it ships, so we really pick up how to use these things ourselves.

One of those features is selecting items. If you never select items, these gestures will be a first for you entirely. However, if you’re used to selecting items, such as selecting multiple emails at once in the Mail app, you probably do something like this: Tap the “Edit” button in the top-right corner of the window, then tap each email one-by-one. It’s a similar action in Notes to select multiple notes: Tap the three dots in the top-right, then choose “Select Notes” before tapping each note you want to select.

That works well enough, but it’s not the most efficient (or the coolest) way to select items on your iPhone. For a number of years now, Apple has included a secret way to select items in most built-in apps that, once you know how, will be the only way you select items going forward.

To do so, open an Apple app, like Notes or Mail, then scroll down on the items with two fingers. As you do, iOS will start selecting the items you’ve scrolled over. To unselect any items, just scroll back. It’s intuitive once you get the hang of it, and it makes selecting a handful of attached items much quicker than other methods.

The only major downside is the gestures isn’t universal across apps. It works in most Apple-made apps, so you won’t have a problem selecting your emails, notes, reminders, Messages conversations, etc. But when it comes to third-party apps, the gesture may or may not work, depending on whether the app’s developer decided to include it. You’ll need to test it out on your favorite apps to see if it works, and make a mental note of where you’ll need to resort to older, slower selecting methods.