Apps on the iPhone and iPad are frequently updated with new features, various enhancements, security adjustments, and other components. If you don’t stay on top of updating iOS apps, you’ll quickly be inundated with dozens of available app updates waiting to be installed for your iPad and iPhone apps.

Fortunately there’s a simple way to handle a barrage of awaiting app updates, because you an easily update all apps at once in the iOS App Store.

You’ll need a stable and speedy internet connection for this trick to work reasonably, otherwise you might be waiting a long while for all the apps to update on slower internet connections.

How to Update All iOS Apps at Once on iPhone or iPad

The ability to update all apps at once is available in all vaguely modern iOS versions, and it’s the same on both iPhone and iPad. Here’s how it works:

• Open the “App Store” on the iPhone or iPad

• Tap on the “Updates” tab

• Once within the Updates section, wait for all updates to load if they have not done so already, then tap on “Update All” in the upper right corner of the screen

• Wait for all apps to download and update, it can take a while to complete

In the App Store, the apps that are updating will have a little spinning circle indicator next to them. When you return to the Home Screen (name for the desktop equivalent on iPhone or iPad), you will see the updating apps icons are tinted and the app names are temporarily changed to “Updating…” or “Waiting…” depending on where they are in the update queue.

Once the app has completed updating, the name of the app and its icon will return to its normal state and naming convention.

The process of updating all apps can be fast or slow, depending on the apps you are updating and their size, and how fast your internet connection is. If you want to prioritize the updating of some apps over others, you can always selectively pause some updates or even stop app downloads by tapping on the waiting icons of apps you want to halt. Sometimes that’s even necessary if an app gets stuck on “Waiting…” during the update process, as pausing and unpausing an app update can often fix that issue immediately.

When finished, all of your iOS apps will be updated, and the numerical update badge indicator on the App Store application will no longer be visible, at least until another app update arrives.

The screenshots here demonstrate updating all apps at once using an iPad, but the process is identical on the iPhone too.

Something worth mentioning is that sometimes apps are updated but the update hasn’t rolled out to your particular device yet, or hasn’t been acknowledged by your App Store. If you know that to be the case, you can refresh the Updates in the App Store of iOS to make them become visible, though that trick will not work if an app update is not universally available yet.

If you’re forgetful about updating apps in iOS, and you don’t want to deal with manually updating all of your apps like described above, you can also choose to enable Automatic Updates for iOS apps too which will attempt to automate the process. Personally I don’t like the automatic update process because sometimes there are apps that I don’t want to update for one reason or another so I have automatic app updates disabled in iOS, but this is just a matter of personal device usage and personal opinion, every iPhone and iPad owner (and device) will be different.

Updating iOS apps is important for many reasons, including enhanced security, new features, greater compatibility, bug fixes, and much more, so it’s good to stay on top of this and not let a trillion updates pile up for apps on your iPhone or iPad. The Update All feature makes it particularly simple, so if you haven’t used it yet, now may be a good time to start.