I created an app shelf in my email and I can't get rid of it

By Dawn πŸ‘©πŸ»β€πŸ¦―, 28 October, 2021

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hey guys!

I'm a recent 15.1 Ipad-OS updater, and I'm having a pretty annoying and vexing issue concerning multitasking and email.

I was on the phone with someone yesterday and they gave me the name of a website to write down. So, I opened an email to emaial it to myself. Well, now, I have an app shelf in my mail app that I can't get rid of, and a window that won't close! I flick down on it, and it just spells out Mail, inbox. There's not an option to close the window either! I contacted Accessibility support yesterday, and they said that shelf was the norm. But, it was not there the other morning. It didn't appear until yesterday.

I didn't even see multitasking controls in the status bar when I updated to 15.1 the night before!

Can anyone please help me get rid of this shelf and window that won't close? Because it's the first thing that pops up when I open my email and it blocacks my compose and emails until I dismiss it!

If I delete my email app and reenstall it, will I get all my email back? I'm using Gmail if that helps.
Any help that can be given would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance!

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Comments

By Yvonnezed on Sunday, November 7, 2021 - 06:21

Ok, I'm not sure how much you know about how iOS works, so some of this may be stuff you already know. When iOS creates a new window, you've basically got multiple instances of the same app. So for example, when you created the new email what seems to have happened is gMail created a new copy of itself with that eMail. It's a good feature, it lets you do things like multi-task with the same app so you've got, say, the text of the email you're replying to on one side and the email you're writing on the other. So anyway, what 15 did was make it obvious if you've got multiple windows, by bringing up the shelf at the bottom of the screen when you first open an app, to let you easily switch between them or close them. First, you're not stuck. If you just touch somewhere else on the screen and start using the app, it should disappear on its own. If you're in the shelf, start swiping left and eventually you'll get to the multitasking control which is actually at the top of the screen. Anyway, if you swipe down on that it'll say "dismiss shelf" and it'll go away.

To stop it showing up when you start the app, you need to close all the other windows. The hself works kind of like the app switcher, you swipe up with three fingers to close a window or close app should be in the actions rotor. The only window this *doesn't* work for is the one that's currently being displayed. So in other words, if you've got one window that's your inbox, and one window that's a mail you're writing, if you're in the window where you're writing the email, you'll have to double tap on the inbox window to bring that one up. then you can delete the other window. Hmm, that was a bit confusing, but believe it or not it makes sense once you start using it.

Anyway, I think they also appear in the normal task switcher as multiple copies of the app, so if all else fails just close them all in there.