Finally, Google adds a ‘select all’ toggle to Gmail for Android

In a move that is so overdue that most of us forgot all about it, Google has finally added a simple ‘select all’ toggle in the Gmail app for Android that is now widely rolling out. I know, you’re likely thinking to yourself, “This wasn’t a thing, yet?” And other than the fact that this omission has frustrated me on multiple occasions in the past, I would have 100% asked the exact same thing. Yet, here we are in 2024 finally getting an option that should have been around for at least a decade now.

To be fair, Google did begin rolling this out slowly in the fall, but not everyone (me included) got that update. It looks like it was a server-side change, but in some recent action over on Reddit (reported by Android Police), it seems everyone should now have this option available to them.

How the ‘select all’ toggle works in Gmail

While this has been a staple feature on the desktop for as long as I can remember, until very recently, you simply couldn’t click one button to select all the items on the screen for deletion or archiving. Silly, right? But there have been many times I’ve stopped triaging email on my phone simply because of the lack of a ‘select all’ option. Clicking every single email one-by-one is an arduous task I’m not inclined to waste my time on.

Now, however, when you click on the email sender’s profile on the left, you’ll see a toggle appear up top that allows you to select all emails on the current page (with Gmail version  2023.11.12.586837719 or 2023.11.26.586591930). It’s simple, effective, and clearly should have been a thing a long, long time ago. Better late than never?

One caveat you’ll want to consider on this: it will only select the emails on the page that have loaded. With Gmail for Android, when you get to the bottom of your first 50 emails, more load in automatically. You don’t have pagination the way you do on the desktop. So, if you want to bulk select more than 50 messages, you’ll want to scroll down a few times to add those to the list before hitting that ‘select all’ toggle. Cheers to easier email on the go!