iOS 11: How to use drag and drop

Drag and Drop has finally made its way to the iOS lineup with iOS 11. While there is no “master” list of items you can drag and drop (developer support is needed for third-party apps), here is a starting point:

Text

Text works like you’d expect. You can drag a block of text from one app to another. Let’s say you have some notes in your note taking app, but you want to send it to Byword to begin a longer article. You can highlight the text and simply drag it over.

Web Addresses

Like text, URLs are merely about grabbing and dropping it elsewhere. I’ve used this to share web addresses in emails, notes, and Messages. You can also share Apple Maps URLs as well.

Files App

The Files app is one of my favorite parts of iOS 11, and you can drag and drop inside the app to help organize your documents.

URLs To Safari

If you have web addresses stored inside Notes for quick reference later, you can also drag it back to Safari to open.

Images

In past versions of iOS, the camera roll was the only way to move images off the web and into apps. With Drag and Drop, you can bypass that completely. You can tap and hold an image in Safari, bring up the Files app, and drop it into a folder. You can follow these same steps to drop images into notes as well.

As I mentioned before, Drag and Drop requires iOS 11 updates for third-party apps. This feature could end up being one of the most used for iOS power users. I can’t wait to see how developers implement it!

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