Hover isn’t really acceptable UX since the touchscreen era

Even on desktops it's not great for accessibility. There isn't an indicator for what has tooltips, and they appear out of the usual flow of control.

Accessibility guidelines usually allow them but encourage you to make it a last resort.

Not to mention that half the time tooltips don't show up until you wiggle the mouse over them a bunch, and tooltip delays are arbitrarily timed and usually far, far too delayed (often on the order of hundreds of milliseconds when they should be like 10-50ms at most). And my biggest pet peeve about them is that, at least in Chromium-based browsers, they really don't like to go away once they finally show up, to the extent that I can often scroll the page until they're offscreen and they still don't disappear. Or they leave the farm entirely and persist outside the browser window.

Also, most windows aren't eligible for tooltips if they are not the focused, active window. I remember that difference being hard to explain to people when Windows 3.x and Mac Classic used entirely different title bars between the two states and sometimes even "shadowed" the window contents. It's especially hard to explain to today in a multi-monitor world and when inactive windows respond by default to all other inputs except some hover behaviors like tooltips. (I'm a software developer and know all this too well and I still tripped over it the other day wondering why tooltips wouldn't show up in a window and only realizing belatedly that the window wasn't active.)

It is ok; you just have to offer a different UX for each medium. And not every application is done on every medium. I don't code or write long-form on my phone.

Laptops have touchscreens too.

And trackpads or mice that let you hover.

Some laptops fold so the mouse/trackpad is inaccessible and/or disabled.

I have a Lenovo yoga, and its a constant nightmare of websites and apps that cannot figure out if I am a laptop or a tablet, even with tablet-mode fully off. I am usually offered whichever UI is least useful for my current configuration

Real question: Are there any touchscreens that provide the equivalent of hover with your finger?

I have an older Android (Samsung S5) with a physical hover feature - you literally hover your finger close to the screen and it triggers hover actions like previewing a message or opening a magnifier over text. It is called "Air View"[1] in Samsung lingo, and was coupled with other features ("Air Gesture"[2]) involving moving your hand over your phone to do things like scrolling or waking the screen.

It's finicky on occasion, but when you are used to it, it's surprisingly intuitive practical! It wasn't super popular though, and I imagine it could be annoying to users who didn't want it. It appears they only did it for a few models, ending in the S5.

That phone was pretty interesting, sensor-wise. I kind of miss using it, and I wonder if it would be practical nowadays.

[1] Air View: https://www.samsung.com/hk_en/support/mobile-devices/what-is...

[2] Air Gesture: https://www.samsung.com/hk_en/support/mobile-devices/what-is...

Would tap-and-hold be the closest equivalent?

At least that’s how you get tooltips on Android. Of course, tooltips were designed to be discovered by a user hesitating with their mouse over an UI element (sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t), while tap-and-hold on buttons you have to know about, and it’s still scary when the button looks like it could do something potentially destructive and you want to find out.

Long-tap to see tooltips is a convention that has been proposed in various incarnations of the Android UI guidelines. The convention was present in very early Android UI guidelines (e.g. Android 4.x); I'm not sure if it still is.

The problem is that long-tap gets used for a lot of other things on Android (extended selection, particularly). The user experience is pretty unhappy if you use both conventions. And, in practice, long-tap tooltips are so rarely provided on Android apps that I doubt that ordinary users would expect them at all.

As far as I know, tap-and-hold (as distinguished from long-tap) isn't a conventional gesture on Android.

>> Hover isn’t really acceptable UX since the touchscreen era

It's an augmentation that can be used on desktops though. I agree that it shouldn't be necessary but, but it can help. Some apps aren't meant for mobile either.

Depends on who your target audience is. Many applications can still safely assume they are for office workers using a desktop or laptop computer with a keyboard and a mouse.

An element should do one thing, not two.

Current state is the best, but it's still not immediately obvious unless you say "current: on" and "Click to turn off" in the hover.

At least sliders generally have right for on, as opposed to pure text toggle buttons which are just awful.