How to rearrange and delete your apps in iOS 13

I’ve been using an iPhone since the iPhone 2G, and one of my all-time favorite iOS gestures is what my colleague Dieter Bohn calls “jiggly mode,” which is when you press and hold an app and all of the apps on your screen start wiggling. This means you can move them around and, if you need to, delete them. That behavior hasn’t really changed since it was first introduced in January 2008, but iOS 13 is going to shake it up a bit.

In iOS 12 and older, if you press and hold on an app (without using 3D Touch), it only takes a second before all of your apps start dancing, and you can move or delete them as you please. But in iOS 13, when you long-press on an app, a contextual menu will pop up, like this:

Depending on the app, the menu will be different, but apps don’t enter jiggly mode like they used to. But never fear: it’s just that they don’t enter it right away. You can still get to jiggly mode pretty easily, and there are a few different ways to do it.

My preferred way is to just keep your finger pressed on the app icon, even after the pop-up menu shows up, and jiggly mode will activate.

When the pop-up menu appears after a long press, you can also drag your finger from the app icon onto “Rearrange Apps” and then let go.

Or when the long press pop-up menu appears, you can drag your finger down and off it, and the app will follow, activating jiggly mode.

That’s it! Using any of these methods, you can put your app into jiggly mode so that you can rearrange and delete apps. It takes a few times to get used to, but it’s easy to adjust.

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