I have been shaken to my core, and now you may be too. It turns out that I’ve been moving iPhone apps around the hard way. Not only was I an early adopter on smart phones, I literally review them for work. Fortunately, I’m not the only tech writer to admit this.
This article was originally posted on November 9, 2019.
Stan Schroeder, a senior editor at Mashable, took to Twitter to admit that he didn’t know that you can move an iPhone app by holding down the icon and then swiping.
12 years of testing smartphones and only now I find the right way to move app icons from one screen to the other.
You hold the icon with one finger and swipe through screens with another.
I used to do it by bringing the icon to the edge of the screen which is slower/annoying.
— Stan Schroeder (@franticnews) October 31, 2019
Like Schroeder, I had been labouring under the misapprehension that you had to hold down the icon and drag it to the edge of the screen to make it swipe to the next one.
It’s time consuming and in retrospect, kinda dumb.
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But while I’m embarrassed for myself, I figured that there has to be other people out there who have been doing the same thing for years. So I decided to put aside my pride in the name of education.
Plus I deserve to be sledged for this.
How to move iPhone apps efficiently
Here’s the smarter and easier way to move an app on an iPhone.
As for Android users, we got it working on some devices but Google Pixels don’t seem to support it. Give it a crack!
How to move more than one app at once
But that’s not all, for iOS at least. You can also use this method to add up to 5 apps to a ‘pile’ with a single tap. You’re then able to move them all to a new screen at once.
Thanks to Jasom Imms from LiveTiles for pointing this one out. Here’s how you do it:
This is life changing stuff.
Say goodbye manually dragging icons and accidentally rearranging a bunch of stuff you didn’t mean to and subsequently going into a rage blackout.
You’re all welcome.
Disclosure: the author owns 12 shares in Apple.