I'm already really excited about Apple's drag-and-drop functionality in iOS 11. The big limitation, however, is that you can only drag and drop between apps on the iPad. On the iPhone your drag and drops are constrained to moving objects around inside an app. For a feature that's so dependent on developer adoption, restraining its most interesting use case to a platform that's vastly less popular than the iPhone is disappointing.

However, we're learning today that iPhone inter-app drag and drop actually exists in iOS 11, it's just disabled by a hidden system setting that can't be accessed by users. Here it is in action:

Interprocess drag & drop on iPhone is gated by the BOOL 'CancelOnDeactivationPhone' in the UIKit prefs (and the aforementioned) pic.twitter.com/6wUbQNd18f — Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) June 12, 2017

Developer Steve Troughton-Smith, who is famous for finding hidden and undocumented features in Apple products, discovered the functionality in the iOS 11 beta. Steve reasonably conjectures that if the next iPhone has a software home button, it might make the perfect drop target:

If Apple’s gonna have an onscreen homebutton on the iPhone 8, it would make a lot of sense to spring-load it for drag & drop. A drop target — Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) June 12, 2017

Because the iPhone doesn't have the slide-up dock, multitasking view, or split screen apps that the iPad has, I can see why Apple thought it should limit drag and drop to its larger mobile device. Hopefully the company will change its mind by the time iOS 11 is ready to ship so we can bring drag and drop to all the people.