Critics often cite Apple's walled garden as one of iOS' biggest flaws and understandably so. Then again, Apple has plenty of valid reasons for keeping its mobile operating system behind lock and key and is generally pretty good about implementing new features.

Other times, they take steps that leave users dumbfounded. Here's one example.

Apple for the longest time made it unnecessarily difficult to mass delete messages in its Mail app. With iOS 9, Apple finally saw the light and baked in a "delete all" feature... only to backtrack and remove the option a year later with iOS 10.

If you're like me and receive a ton of spam daily, not being able to clean out an inbox in a hurry is a major inconvenience. Fortunately, there's a nifty workaround that'll allow you to quickly delete all of the messages in your Mail inbox once again.

With the Mail app open and in your inbox, tap the "Edit" button in the top right corner then select any message to put a checkmark beside it.

From there, tap and hold "Move" at the bottom of the screen with one finger then tap the message you just selected to "uncheck" it and remove your other finger from the "Move" button. This will bring you to a new screen where you can select "Trash" to move all of the messages from your inbox to the trash.

It's a bit cumbersome but it certainly beats having to manually select each and every message for deletion. Now, if Apple could just regain its sense and bring back the "delete all" function in iOS 11...

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