In fact, when Apple was first building iOS drag-and-drop, it was originally destined to only be available on iPads. At some point, Apple decided that iPhone users could take advantage of drag-and-drop too, and so added support for it—but only within individual applications. So on the iPhone in iOS 11, you can drag text from out of one note in Notes, switch to a different note, and drop it in. But if you want to drag and drop across apps, you’ll need to use an iPad.
That’s the bad news. Now here’s the good: dragging on dropping on the iPad is pretty great. It takes some getting used to, but once you realize how powerful and flexible drag-and-drop is on the iPad, you’ll never want to use iOS 10 again. With Split View, you can perform a task like dragging and dropping a URL from Safari into a document you are creating with a text editor. Here’s how it works: With images and other items, you simply tap and hold your finger on an item.
If it’s draggable, you’ll see it “lift up”, as if being peeled off of a lower layer. If you’re selecting text, you’ll first need to select the text you want, then tap and hold on the selection to “lift up” that text. Once you’ve picked up an item, you can drag it anywhere. If you’re running in Split View, you can simply drag from the app on one side of the screen and drop it on the other side. It’s simple and pretty functional, and is probably just how most of us envisioned using drag-and-drop on iOS.
But Apple’s implementation goes way beyond that simple Split View drag. OS 11 really embraces multitouch in a way that previous versions didn’t. While you’re holding that selection with one finger, you can perform other operations with your other fingers. This means you could tap on an app and switch to another view, and then drop the content there. You could even swipe up and into the multitasking view, then swipe to a different app, and tap on that app to bring it forward, and then drop the data.
Even better, the multitasking view is spring-loaded. When you drag a selection over an app and wait a moment, that app will zoom forward. This also works if you swipe up to reveal the Dock, then hold your selection over a particular app’s icon. That app will zoom forward, ready for your data. In some apps, such as Photos, you can make multiple drag-and-drop selections by “lifting up” one item and then tapping with another finger on other items to add them to the stack.
You can even hand off items from one hand to another, by placing a second finger on the screen, dragging the selection over to your second finger, and then letting go with the first finger. It all feels logical and natural. Drag and drop on the iPhone is limited to within the app you are using. When I dragged an image out of Photos and into a Markdown text editor I use to write stories for the web, I fully expected the app to reject the photo or import something useless like its filename.
Instead, the app took the photo, copied it to the same Dropbox folder that my text file was saved in, and inserted the proper Markdown image-referencing code into my file. That’s some intelligent app design, but the end result is “it just works” simplicity that all app developers should aspire to.
Given how flexible drag-and-drop is on the iPad, I’m disappointed that Apple didn’t embrace cross-app drag-and-drop on the iPhone. So it took ten years, but at least it’s finally here, and it’s very good. If you’re an iPad user, you may need to take some time to unlearn your old habits and expand your mind to new possibilities. Before you know it, you’ll forget the rules of the last decade and begin dragging and dropping with abandon.
Updated on March 23, 2018 Alfred Amuno moreAlfred is a long-time teacher and computer enthusiast who works with and troubleshoots a wide range of computing devices. Contact Author If you want to unjailbreak your iPhone and uninstall Cydia apps, it will require you to do IOS restore of some kind.
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