There’s a Much Faster Way to Scroll on Your iPhone

When you start swiping through a long web page, message thread, or document on your iPhone, you see a scrollbar in the right edge. It’s a thin, greyed-out pill that disappears almost instantly as you stop swiping, making it feel like Apple doesn’t even really want it there. But you should want it there. In fact, if you’re ignoring the scrollbar on your iPhone, you’re scrolling all wrong.

Scrollbars have served a real purpose in desktop operating systems. At first, you would click on the top part to go up, bottom part to go down on the page. But as interfaces got better, you could click the scrollbar itself, and use the mouse to move anywhere in the page with ease and accuracy. This is how we’ve scrolled on desktop since the 70s, and it still works today (albeit, scroll wheels and trackpads are much more in vogue).

As it turns out, the same thing can actually be done on your iPhone as well. Swipe once to reveal the mighty scrollbar; then, tap and hold on the gray pill on the edge. When you feel a haptic tap on your iPhone, that’s your signal: You have now picked up the scrollbar. Move your finger up and down to navigate the page faster than ever before. Once you get the hang of the movement, you can scroll through long pages on your iPhone with both speed and accuracy.

This, by the way, is not the end of the weird gestures that can help you better navigate your iPhone. You might know you can tap on the top of the screen to scroll to the top of the current page, but you can also use three-finger swipe gestures to quickly undo and redo text entries anywhere. We’ve outlined additional weird iPhone gestures here, so take a look if you’re hungry for more.