I thought it was a pretty good feature although it worked better when it was new and apple were more invested in it.

In particular the three best common uses were moving the cursor for the keyboard, selecting things, and previewing web pages.

1. Felt like they made it slightly worse at some point but still good (though it fails on some websites which try to do weird hacks things)

2. This was great. Selecting things outside the keyboard was broken by a software update a few years ago but the keyboard was still good. (A hidden feature is that if you select a word then press shift, the keyboard recommends capitalising/uppercasing the word. I wish this worked for larger selections, downcasing, quotes and brackets (and I guess ¿? too))

3. Was handy to see what a link had without wasting time (going there then back wasn’t perfect for buggy websites like twitter which break navigation). It also helped unbreak webpages that did weird things with navigation (the pop up was a “new” page which the JS didn’t see as a link click and if you pressed harder then navigation would be successful). It was I think always broken for urls with an anchor (I.e. ending in #foo) and would either not scroll on pop up or lose its place if you opened/new tabbed the page. In a recent version it breaks with high probability by laying out pages with a width of 0 so one cannot see the contents of the page in the pop up.

They've probably kept the "long press action" for compat reasons? It's equally undiscoverable. I'm not super sad about this one; it was a weird thing from the beginning. It shouldn't have been introduced at all.

This feature was introduced in 2014. The timing of the removal makes me think it's related to the departure of Jony Ives.

> They've probably kept the "long press action" for compat reasons?

I'm not sure what you mean. From what I can tell, they're introducing the long press action all over the OS, to replace Peek and Pop with "context menus". https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Previously, they had the long press action in just a few spots for non-3D Touch phones (like on Control Center icons on the iPhone XR).

I've been on the iOS 13 beta for a while now and I vastly prefer the new context menus (although on my iPhone X I can trigger the context menu with either a long press or 3D Touch).

To clarify: In order to maintain app compatibility with this ill-advised HW feature that they are now abandoning, they will need to do something. I'm guessing they'll probably translate long press events into force touch events for third party apps. Do you have better intel?

Oh, I see what you mean. I would assume that the Peek menu UI will remain supported, or perhaps there will be a compat library that will port it to the iOS 13 context menus. I'm not sure. I also don't know how it would work if a pre-iOS 13 third-party app implemented both 3D Touch and a long press to do different things on the same UI element.

It's difficult to reliably do one and not the other for some people, myself included.

Exactly. I think I end up doing a long press any time I mean to do a "force press" anyway.

> The timing of the removal makes me think it's related to the departure of Jony Ives

This has been in the pipeline for awhile. The XR already didn't have it, the SE didn't have it, and the iPad never had it. It's the type of feature that can't be truly great until it gets full support across the board, but that never really materialized.

Perhaps Ives met severe resistance internally regarding this feature and the lack at least on iPad can be explained by internal politics? (The SE exception can be explained by cost cutting rationales.)

XR - I dunno.

The lack of 3D Touch on iPad was due to difficulty getting it to work on the large screen (obviously nobody knows that for sure, but those were the rumors years ago).

The lack of 3D Touch on XR was due to cost, and apparently their plan to ditch it everywhere.

The lack of 3D Touch on iPhone Pro...that's disappointing. It would have been a great "Pro" feature to offer. A "Pro" feature that allows you to be more productive on your phone. Aside for the video features (which I don't see being used by professionals anyway), what makes this device a "Pro" anything?

Ive, not Ives.

> They've probably kept the "long press action" for compat reasons? It's equally undiscoverable.

It also doesn't do half as much. E.g. the long-press on the keyboard spacebar only moves the cursor, it doesn't do 3D touch's text selections.

Ive been using iOS 13 and am not liking the haptic touch enhancements like...

1. Now to delete an app from homescreen I have to choose from a menu and then click the X to delete. Inside the menu I usually see "share this app," which for me holds no value.

2. The worst is haptic touch in Safari. While scrolling now Im constantly tapping a link and opening a maddening preview window. Terrible... anyone know how to turn that off?

If you keep your finger on the icon a little bit longer after the menu shows up then it will start shaking and you can delete it. No need to use the menu.

Yes: when the preview shows up you can turn it off from the menu that comes alongside it.

Thanks and unfortunately I still see a preview menu just not the full preview window.

I don't want to scroll while browsing and have any windows appear unless I click a specified link. With this addition each link I scroll and mistakenly grab brings up this annoying preview menu.

I don't get it ... is this addition helpful to others? Anyone else extremely annoyed by it?

I'm not really a fan of the new presentation, but that's mostly because it animates in a really annoying, bubbly way :/

Wait what? I kinda saw it coming with XR.. It’s still bad tho.

3D touch is an _amazing_ feature for power users, and one of the few that markedly differentiated the iphones from competition. Biggest thing is text editing of course, where 3D selection increases productivity _several times_, but potential was even greater if implemented more.

Ironic that they are marketing this one as pro.

I bought a X recently and plan on keeping it for years. If they software disable it with an OS update or some BS i’m gonna be so mad.

Also, I feel kinda stupid saying it but I feel like this is the sort of thing steve Jobs would have pushed harder for

It’s basically dead in iOS 13 even for phones that still support it.

Force press to select a word is still faster that long press by an order of magnitude. Same for the new context menus and keyboard cursor movement.

Second force press to extend selection is much faster and more precise than picking the small markers.

it’s more like force touch is made more consistent overall and blends in instead of being a showcase feature confusingly entirely separate of long press.

I use it even more than before, and still miss it on my iPad. Together with the disappearance of fingerprint unlocking, seeing it disappear is one more factor for me not to upgrade beyond iPhone 8.

Don’t get me wrong, there are compelling reasons to upgrade for me (bigger screen, photography) but for my usage it feels like a significant enough compromise at that price point.

Force press to select a word just doesn’t really work well. I am trying it now in Safari and most of the time the word is selected and the menu pops up and when I release my finger the menu and selection instantly disappear. Other places with force touch actions I’ve found equally buggy.

edit: Oh i played with it a bit more and it seems you have to press gently first, then hard. You can’t press hard straight away or it reinterprets it as a light touch after you let go. That’s quite unintuitive.

WHY

Personally, I absolutely hate 3D Touch. I've never been able to get the hang of the distinction between it and a long press, so something as simple as moving apps around or selecting a character with an umlaut is incredibly frustrating.

It was a hidden feature that Apple struggled to communicate (and was hard to describe without physically trying it) was always going to be problematic.

How do you train users? What is the discoverability? It was a legitimate problem when most of your user-base aren't tech nerds and most people aren't reading the manual/help guides.

So you implement an app feature via 3D Touch and users just assume that feature doesn't exist (because they don't discover it). Then you add it twice (3D Touch AND non-3D Touch) and you're now maintaining two things, and have gained little to nothing via 3D Touch.

I liken it to Windows 8's gesture UI failure. If users cannot discover it, it doesn't exist. So you cannot really build much around it because you have to assume user ignorance.

How do you train users about mouse right button?

By implementing it at the beginning of a UX paradigm cycle when the numbers of users are small, curious and in learning mode. Like how right-clicking was introduced when the number of Windows users was like 1/1000 of the number of the peak number of Windows users.

You don't implement it during/after peaking of said cycle. That's some crazy level of delusion/arrogance. Turns out not even Apple can do pull that stunt.

And I’d wager a significant percentage of Windows users still don’t use it (or don’t understand when to use it).

And it’s vastly more discoverable than 3D Touch.

with a huge amount of difficulty?

Most computer users still don't use middle-click/scroll wheel click, or even the back/forward buttons and they're almost twenty years old.

By simply pointing at another hard to train piece of hidden functionality and saying "what about THIS?!" you haven't really proven anything, except that with enough forced training anything can become common knowledge.

3D Touch is exactly like right click, but they're also competing against implicit training via passed users of Apple's own products, other touch devices, and even other computing (since no other platform has anything like 3D Touch).

They offered no on-screen guide or tutorial when it launched.

The worst part is that they removed it but didn't replace hard press gestures on push notifications with long press gestures.

So now on any phone without 3D Touch, which is all of them going forward, you can't open notification actions in a single gesture. Have to swipe and hit View.

I hate this.

The 3D Touch on the keyboard to edit text is absolutely amazing. I use it all the time and saves me a lot of time. I love it. It's a shame that most people don't know about it. However I don't use any other feature with 3D touch, either because I don't know about it or I find it useful.

That feature is also available without 3D Touch, just use a long press.

The long press doesn't have the same capability. With 3D touch you can also select text by pressing harder on the screen, which is the real magic of that feature.

I also use 3D touch along the left edge for app switching.

Is this confirmed yet? Would be sad indeed.

The Pro has "haptic touch" which is just the long press instead. See: https://www.apple.com/iphone-11-pro/specs/

Neither 11 nor 11 Pro have 3D Touch.

I never quite liked it. Trello for example - with 3D Touch, it never quite worked nicely for the long press.