Little-known iPhone shortcut is super helpful across multiple different apps

Even if you spend half your life glued to your iPhone, there’s a good chance it’s still hiding a few tricks you’ve never stumbled across.

After all, Apple packs its devices with small quality-of-life features that don’t always make the headlines, and as a result, plenty of genuinely useful tools go completely unnoticed by everyday users.

Most people know the obvious stuff, such as swiping away notifications, long-pressing for quick actions, or tapping the back of the phone for shortcuts.

On the other hand, beneath all that, there are features designed to save time, tidy up your apps, and make navigating the brand’s smartphone touchscreens far smoother than endlessly jabbing at individual items.

A simple two-finger swipe instantly speeds up everyday phone tasks (georgeclerk/Getty Images)

Although some stay hidden from the mass majority of Apple lovers until pointed out, this latest discovery is definitely an interesting one. If you’re someone with an inbox overflowing with messages or a Notes app you treat like a digital attic, this lesser-known gem of a feature might especially be a game-changer.

Buried inside iOS is a simple two-finger swipe that instantly selects multiple items at once.

That’s with no menus, no hidden settings, and no need to manually tap your way down a list. Just open Messages, Mail, Notes, Reminders, Files, or even your recent calls, place two fingers on the screen, and swipe downward to trigger bulk-select mode.

From there, everything you drag across is highlighted automatically. If you accidentally select something you want to keep, you can tap the small check mark beside it to deselect.

Then, once you’ve gathered everything you want gone, a single press of ‘Delete’ clears it out in one move. It’s the closest thing the iPhone has to the classic Command-A or Shift-click shortcuts on a computer, and it works across far more apps than most people realise.

This hidden iOS trick makes inbox clean-ups much easier (Tim Robberts/Getty Images)

It isn’t the only overlooked gesture tucked away inside the system, either. Pressing and holding the spacebar transforms the keyboard into a trackpad, letting you slide your cursor around the screen far more precisely than tapping. There’s an undo gesture, too: take three fingers and slide them to the left to reverse your last action. Slide the same three fingers to the right, and it’ll redo it instead.

We don’t know what hidden bonus features the tech giant will be adding next, but this one’s a nice understated extra perk that will keep us going until the iPhone 18 comes out.