My iPhone is rarely far away. I pick up the thing dozens of times a day, and I spend far too long staring into it.
Which is why I’m embarrassed that I only just discovered a feature the other day.
If you’re like me, you’ll have a lot of apps installed. In order to tame my apps, I moved away from having them spread across pages and pages on the home screen and put apps into folders (folders that start life being creatively named, but the name and contents quickly drift, rendering my naming convention useless).
I did this because scrolling across multiple screens is a pain.
Until I found out that there’s a much quicker way to scroll through the pages.
Must read: You’re using your Android and Mac’s fingerprint reader all wrong
If you have multiple screens of apps on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll notice that there are dots at the bottom of the page representing the pages. I’d always thought of these as page indicators.
Turns out you can use it like a scrollbar to scrub through your pages quick.
There’s also a lovely bit of haptic feedback as your go through the pages.
I can’t believe that it’s taken me this long to find out I could do this. There’s a part of me that’s sure that at some point I knew this and forgot about it, but I don’t think so.
Apple has clearly realized that app overload is a problem, introducing the App Library in iOS 14 to help alleviate the problems.
That said, I find the App Library to be a bit chaotic, and it feels like an idea that needs some more work.
Ideally, I’d like to get my apps onto a single page, but alas haven’t yet unlocked that level of digital minimalism.