You’re going to L-O-V-E this tip. You know how sometimes you see a folder on your iPhone’s home screen, and there’s a red notification badge on the folder itself? That badge is a summary of all the unread notifications of the apps inside the folder. Of course, at this point you just ignore it, because you don’t want to swipe through the pages of never-used apps inside the folder, just to see which apps have unread alerts.
But what if there was a way to quickly see which apps in that folder have outstanding notifications. Well, there is! And you’re going to kick yourself when you see how easy it is.
3D Touch a folder to see a list of badged apps
Without any further delay, here’s the trick in action, as revealed to Cult of Mac by Joe Buhlig on Twitter:
Yes, if you long-press/3D Touch on the folder itself, a panel will appear listing all the apps inside that have alert badges. It lists only the apps with alerts. It also puts them all in a handy list, so you can tap a specific app to open it and deal with whatever lies within.

Photo: Cult of Mac
And that’s it. Perhaps you already knew about this amazing trick, in which case, why did you never bother to tell me about it? And if you didn’t know this trick, then I expect that your mind is as blown as mine was yesterday when I first saw it.
Quick Tip: If you have a folder on iOS with a badge showing, 3D Touch the folder to see the list of apps with badges. pic.twitter.com/ZqWDNIQFsj
— Joe Buhlig (@JoeBuhlig) July 31, 2019
Bonus: If you’re running iPadOS 13, you also can do this trick with folders on the iPad. That’s because iPadOS 13 supports the iPhone’s 3D Touch presses (without the actual 3D Touch part).