Quitting out of running apps post iOS 7 is a bit different than it was before, but once you get the hang of using the new multitasking screen, you’ll find the change is for the better. Not only can you use this to close out of a single app, but with a simple multitouch gesture you can also quit out of multiple apps at the same time.

Regular readers will recall that included this trick as one of the four essential tips for learning some of the major changes made in iOS 7, but we still get so many questions about it that we think it’s worthy of it’s own post. Let’s get right to it:

Quit a Single App in iOS 7

• Double-tap the Home button on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to summon the multitasking screen


• Swipe up on an apps preview panel to push it off of the screen to quit an app


• Repeat as necessary for closing other apps

Quitting Multiple Apps in iOS 7

• Double-tap the Home button to bring up the app switcher as usual


• Place your fingers onto multiple app preview panels and swipe up on them together, pushing them off screen to quit


• Repeat to quit all running apps on an iOS 7 device

The multitouch gesture works with all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices that are running iOS 7. You can quit up to three apps at a time this way, or just two at a time if you find that easier, makign this the fastest way to quickly cycle through and close out of all running apps on any iOS device.

The video below demonstrates quitting both single apps using the normal swipe up, and closing out of multiple apps at a time using the multitouch trick.

This trick will quit out of any running app, but it’s worth mentioning that it is not the same as using the traditional “force quit” trick, which has been baked into iOS since the beginning and which remains the same post iOS 7. For most use cases, using the standard method mentioned above is more than enough to exit out of apps if it’s needed, and the true force quit method should only be used when an app is frozen on screen thereby rendering the entire device unusable.

Older versions of iOS did include multitouch support for closing multiple apps as well, but the touch targets were much smaller making it a lot harder to accomplish.

A handy terminal command will show a list of all apps installed on a Mac that have come exclusively from the Mac App Store. This can be helpful for a variety of reasons, like when building a list of apps you may want to replace from outside the official App Store channels if you’re migrating machines, or if you’re working on a remote Mac through SSH and are trying to figure out what apps are missing. You could piece together such a list manually as well by reviewing the Purchase History within the App Store, but that listing also displays items that are not actively installed on a Mac, making it much less useful.

These tricks use the command line and Terminal, making them a bit more advanced. Nonetheless, since you’re just copy and pasting a command string into the terminal, even novice users can follow along if they’re interested in learning a bit more about the Terminal. For the unfamiliar, Terminal.app is always found in /Applications/Utilities/

Show All Apps Downloaded from the Mac App Store

Copy and paste the following command into the Terminal:

find /Applications -path '*Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt' -maxdepth 4 -print |\sed 's#.app/Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt#.app#g; s#/Applications/##'

Sample output may look something like this (shortened for the purpose of this article):

GarageBand.app

iMovie.app

Install OS X Mountain Lion.app

iPhoto.app

Pixelmator.app

Pocket.app

Skitch.app

Textual.app

TextWrangler.app

The Unarchiver.app

TweetDeck.app

Twitter.app

WriteRoom.app

Xcode.app

You may find it more useful to send the results into a text file, which is easily done by adding “> appstorelist.txt” to the end of the command like so:

find /Applications -path '*Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt' -maxdepth 4 -print |\sed 's#.app/Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt#.app#g; s#/Applications/##' > macapps.txt

This command will include apps that have been downloaded but since hidden as well.

Such an app list could then be compared easily to a list on another machine to see which apps may need to be installed.

Show All Applications in OS X

To see all apps installed in the OS X applications folder you can simply list the directory with the ls command. This is probably pretty obvious to most who would be using the command line, but we’ll cover it anyway for those who are new or less familiar with the Terminal:

ls /Applications/

This shows everything sitting in the /Applications directory, which includes every single user installed app as well as what came from the Mac App Store.

If you wanted to save such a list to a text file as well, for comparison purposes or otherwise, you could either redirect it to a txt document from the terminal:

ls /Applications/ > allmacapps.txt

Alternatively, without using the command line you could use this trick to save the list to a file directly from the Finder too.

Heads up to CommandLineFu for the sed-based trick.

The Messages app received a significant makeover post iOS 7, and like many other elements of iOS some of it’s functionality changed as well. Many users have noticed that the behavior to delete messages has changed, leading some to believe the deletion feature was removed from Messages entirely (it wasn’t). Let’s review how to remove segments of message threads in iOS 7, and also how to delete an entire message conversation from the app completely.

Removing a message works the same for iMessages, multimedia messages, and for standard SMS text messages.

Delete Individual Segments of a Messages

• Open the messages conversation, then tap and hold on any text or image within the message dialog


• Choose “More” from the pop-up menu, then tap on the messages to delete so that a checkbox appears next to them


• Tap the Trash icon in the corner, then confirm the message deletion by choosing “Delete Message”

The primary difference between how this works now post iOS 7 versus Messages prior to iOS 7 is the removal of the “Edit” button, which has now be transformed into part of either the tap-and-hold trick mentioned above, or as a gesture which we’ll cover next.

If you’d prefer to delete an entire message thread, you can do that too, which is actually much easier than removing parts of a conversation.

Delete an Entire Messages Conversation

• Open Messages app and from the primary message screen, swipe left on the entire conversation to delete


• Tap the red “Delete” button to instsantly remove the entire message conversation

Unlike removing segments of conversations, deleting the entire conversation has no confirmation, so be sure you want to delete the entire thread before continuing.

The removal of buttons is widespread throughout iOS after the 7.0 release, and like in many places there has been a move to gestures instead, whether it’s quitting apps, unlocking the screen, deleting emails and messages, or searching spotlight.