Turns Out We've Been Selecting Text Wrong This Whole Time — There's a MUCH Better Way

A few things on Android and iPhone have not been perfected. For instance, selecting and copying text is a task I often find myself fumbling over. But recently, we stumbled across a nifty way to select text that's a huge improvement over how we've been doing it.

To best explain this how to do this, I'd compare it to when you click on some text with a mouse and keep the button held down while you drag to select many words. Find a place you can select text on your phone, then long-press a word. Without letting go, drag up, down, left, or right to highlight as many words as you want.

You will find this works very similarly to a mouse, and it's exactly the same gesture on both Android and iOS. It's definitely better than long-pressing a single word to select it, then using those tiny little drag handles to adjust the selection. Now if we could only figure out how to unlock a Face ID phone when it's on a table ...

Cover image and GIF by Spencer Depas/Gadget Hacks