Gmail is undeniably one of the top email apps for Android smartphone suers. The app holds its position as the most widely used email service globally. However, it’s not flawless. Like many other Google products, it has some notable shortcomings that can leave you wondering. Particularly when considering the presence of industry-leading features such as Help Me Write and advanced search filters that it does support. One of the most surprising omissions over the years has been the absence of a Select All option in the app. Instead, users had to manually choose each email they wanted to delete, archive, or recategorize. Fortunately, this has finally changed.
Select All Option is Now Available in Gmail for Android
The introduction of the Select All button in the Gmail app for Android was first hinted at in September. At that time, AssembleDebug from TheSpAndroid noticed some hidden flags indicating that Google was working on the feature, although it wasn’t accessible to regular users. A few weeks later, 9to5Google mentioned that a small number of users had observed the feature during testing. However, it wasn’t linked to a specific app version and seemed to depend on a server-side change, likely at the account level.
Following a report on Reddit today about the feature being observed by some users, further investigation was conducted. Across multiple devices, Google accounts, and different versions of the Gmail app (specifically, 2023.11.12.586837719 and 2023.11.26.586591930), the new Select All feature was consistently available. This suggests that the rollout of the feature is widespread.
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How to Use the “Select All” Feature in Gmail App for Android
The addition of the Select All feature in the Gmail app is intuitive, even if it comes quite late. To use it, you can simply long-press an email or tap the sender’s avatar on the left to select a single conversation. Once selected, you will see the new Select All option at the top of the list. Similar to the feature that has been available on the desktop site for years, this functionality works across various views, including search results, inboxes, and categories.
There’s an interesting quirk with the Select All feature: it doesn’t always select every email in a view. When you use this option, it selects all the emails on the current page. The number of emails is typically set to 50 by default. A peculiar aspect of Gmail for Android’s endless scrolling UI is that if you tap Select All and then scroll down past the 50th email (if the list is long enough), you may see a bunch of emails that aren’t selected until they load. However, if you scroll to the end of a list before using Select All, you can actually batch-select all the emails that were in that particular view.
Conclusion
Discussing something as basic as a Select All button for an email app in 2024 might sound surprising. But that’s characteristic of Google. The company often appears focused on pursuing the next groundbreaking innovation. Due to this, it sometimes overlooks the small, incremental improvements. Such improvements may be small but can significantly enhance user experience. Despite this tendency, it’s the prospect of transformative developments that continues to capture our interest. Even if it means experimenting with AI across various products to see what resonates with users.