Today I learned an iPhone trick to quickly select multiple items

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Did anyone else know that there is a built-in gesture to bulk select messages, emails, notes, and more across Apple's stock apps? If you want to select every item in the list, you can just use your fingers, rather than using a sub-menu.

If you already know about it, then stop reading now, but I and several of my colleagues only learned about it when developer Jordan Morgan complained about the lack of third-party apps using it. It's a feature that's available to all apps on iPadOS, but only in Apple's stock apps. It is available in Messages, Mail, Notes, and Reminders, but there are more.

One Apple app that I would really like to see use the feature is Clock, where it could be a great way of selecting all the alarms you no longer need and then removing them in one fell swoop. It would be great to see it used across more third-party apps.

Apple's attempt to make it as intuitive as possible can lead to hidden features like this, which show how hard it is to reveal more advanced features to users over time. That is very apparent with iPadOS. Most users can easily overlook the extra bits of laptop-like function that my ex-colleague Dieter Bohn has written about.