In iOS 13 you can just drag the cursor around with no special technique or gesture. It also effectively removes the peek and pop paradigm and replaces it with context menus which work on all devices. It seems pretty clear that they’re setting up to remove 3D Touch.

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Yeah, that has to be my favorite use-case for the force-touch on iOS. The way text selection works on iOS has never felt that smooth, but force touch takes away some of the worst pain.

Shame it’s got zero discoverability. Most people I know are surprised when I show them that. It also has quite a steep learning curve for some. Plus, some of the more advanced useful stuff is pretty hard to use - for example, did you know you can switch to text selection by “pulsing” your finger twice while pressing the keyboard?

Yes, the pulse selection is the most useful part of the implementation, and makes me not want to upgrade to iOS 13 on my iPhone X based on feature degradation alone. I use 3D Touch all the time and have for years now. I don’t understand the “zero discoverability” claim. It is natural to try and push harder on the screen, and it’s extremely fast. Ive often thought they should leverage the Taptic Engine to offer (at least in accessibility settings) an option for haptic feedback for all deep touches system wide, with like a double knock telling you that nothing happened. And honestly, peeking/popping links is the single greatest innovation in mobile web UX in a decade, deprivation of the tech stack is a travesty for a premium gadget brand like Apple.

Yeah 3D / force touch is a "miss" that I strongly feel should have been a "hit," as it's a pretty innovative idea - mostly from the hardware side - but was either difficult to discovery for users and/or apps didn't have good examples.

Most baffling for me is the fact I use mac counterpart to this - force touch - every single day even though most apps don't support it; VS code for example would profit immensely from using it to peek definition, but alas, electron does not support it at all.