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My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

• nobrains 4y ago
  So Jesse's feature was moved, not removed (as he can still access the trackpad feature using a different mechanism), and he is complaining because his muscle memory keep using the previous method? I feel for him, but no company can design to cater to all users.
  • whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    They work very differently. One could be initiated instantly and had granular control. The other requires a wait time and a second finger to do the same thing.
• MockObject 4y ago
  What is this? I've been using iPhones since 4, and this is the first I'm hearing of this feature. I guess that's why they removed it.
• john_the_writer 4y ago
  Was it earphones. I used to love my iPhone for music. I've a really nice set of noise cancelling headphones. Now I have a dongle (that always goes missing). I almost never listen to music with my iPhone anymore.
  • koinedad 4y ago
    No but that's a good one as well! It was 3D Touch, where the screen actually had pressure sensitivity built into it.
  • Kaibeezy 4y ago
    Tape your dongle to your headphone cable?
    • thih9 4y ago
      What if you use multiple devices, e.g. a laptop too?
      • Kaibeezy 4y ago
        https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/never-lose-your-iphone-headphone-adapter/amp/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/never-lose-your-ipho...
  • astrange 4y ago
    I didn't know anyone made noise cancelling headphones that weren't wireless. What's the point? You need a bunch of electronics in there anyway.
• asplake 4y ago
  The replacement for 3D Touch: “If you long press (aka hold down) on the spacebar of your touch screen keyboard (which works on iPad too) you can get into trackpad mode.” I did not know that. Thank you!
• snoopy_telex 4y ago
  I also miss 3D Touch
• can16358p 4y ago
  Same. I think myself as a power user for 3D Touch especially for using the keyboard to navigate within text. Not to mention previews (while I know most of these features still work to some extent by long press, it's more cumbersome). I also get it that many "normal" users didn't even know about the feature and added complexity to hardware, so it was right for Apple to remove it, but I really miss it.
• Shank 4y ago
  I agree with this entirely too much. I switched to Android via the iPhone 6S, which was the first one with 3D Touch. I thought it actually made the “hardware and software together” argument super strong too, because it truly only made sense when the OS supported it. I know it was a power user feature, and I wish they kept it on the pro iPhones or reintroduced it there. One-handed text selection was an absolutely awesome feature, and it’s definitely not something everybody needs. But I too miss it dearly.
• firasd 4y ago
  Kinda unfortunate that phones have made basic workflow gestures like this so obscure. Let's not even get into how "undo" is accessed by shaking the whole device
  • zimpenfish 4y ago
    Although there are now[1] three non-shaking ways to access undo[2] - 1) the three-finger tap which brings up the copy and paste icon bar also contains undo and redo, 2) three-finger swipe left, 3) three-finger double tap (which isn't 100% reliable for me in things like Safari since it tends to trigger "show me the tabs"). [1] Since iOS 13, 2019 [2] https://www.macworld.com/article/233056/ios-13-and-ipados-13-how-to-use-the-new-gestures-for-cut-copy-paste-undo-and-redo.html https://www.macworld.com/article/233056/ios-13-and-ipados-13...
    • mcintyre1994 4y ago
      I didn't know about any of those but they all sound a lot better than shake which never works for me. TY!
      • zimpenfish 4y ago
        Yeah, they could really do with a "I see you're shaking the phone to undo, what about trying one of these new ways?" kind of popup / tutorial for things like this. They're great at introducing new features but useless at surfacing them to users.
  • raverbashing 4y ago
    This is the true problem. A lot of this is not discoverable And for real, I'm suspecting Android is better at this than iPhone
    • firasd 4y ago
      Yeah on Android interfaces there is a common concept of a 'hamburger icon' on screens. It may not be the best UX but at least if a dev doesn't know how to expose a certain feature in the UI they can put it in the menu that expands from the three dots icon
• thih9 4y ago
  One of the issues with the 3D Touch replacement (“long press”) is that if I accidentally hold a finger on the screen for too long (e.g. I’m touching lightly to scroll, but pausing for a moment to finish reading), then I’m unintentionally long pressing something. This wouldn’t happen with 3D Touch. Another one is that the illusion of pressing a tactile button is gone. 3D Touch would give tactile feedback only if the screen was pressed with force; this was realistic enough to simulate actual buttons on iphone7/8. The long press has no way of measuring force, so it accepts light touch too and still responds with haptic feedback; this doesn’t happen in the real world and the illusion is gone.
  • ntauthority 4y ago
    > I’m touching lightly to scroll, but pausing for a moment to finish reading Just checked on my own behavior in this regard, and I seem to have grown a habit of just scrolling slightly enough to not make it appear to be a long press before actually resting my finger on the screen. This might be a more common habit and would explain the consensus of long presses not being seen as too problematic.
    • thih9 4y ago
      The device quickly teaches you to do scroll like that, otherwise you get an unwanted “tap”, almost like negative feedback. Anecdotical, I remember not having to do this initial micro scroll as a more comfortable scrolling experience.
• Lucent 4y ago
  Every family member whose midrange phone I have to update due to EOL software or additional carrier bands somehow loses every feature they actually value and they rightfully complain it's a downgrade.
  • slowmotiony 4y ago
    I feel like this even without replacing my hardware, the software alone updates itself and changes all the time. I feel like whenever I open the youtube app it looks slightly different. See that button? Now it's gone! A week later, it's there again! Few days later, it's gone again, turns out the previous week was just A/B testing.
    • MereInterest 4y ago
      I wanted to play music that was stored locally on my phone. But Play Music has been deprecated for YouTube Music, and so it only redirects to a download page. Which would mean figuring out new permissions for a new application, whether it can read local files at all, whether it can read local files that may be marked as accessible only by a different application, whether the new app will give notifications that need to be disabled, and so on. Why is it being replaced? Because there's a new branding. Why is the old application being disabled? Because it would be insecure to keep it without security updates. Why does it need security updates? Because it accesses the internet. Why does a local music player need to access the internet? Because they merged the local music player and streaming music player. So there's a ridiculous user experience and unnecessary deprecation, all because local functionality interacts with nonlocal functionality.
  • vanilla_nut 4y ago
    I know everyone’s sick of hearing about it, but they’ve permanently lost my interest in upgrading thanks to the aux jack removal. Some features are so important that across the board improvements elsewhere still don’t justify the loss. Kind of like an escape key on a keyboard.
• rexf 4y ago
  I definitely don't miss it. Sure, it was great pressing into the keyboard to move your text cursor position, but it was a feature that most users didn't know about (and would never find about since there was usually no visual affordance). Why would Apple keep hardware that most people didn't know about and didn't use? I do miss the headphone jack, but clearly Apple is not bringing that back.
• degun 4y ago
  Oh poor man. You have to go "all the way" to the spacebar to do it now? So sad.
• stormbrew 4y ago
  3d touch was incredibly frustrating because there was both long touch and hard touch and they both feel like similar actions but did different things. I think the world is better off without it adding on yet another way to hide potential user actions behind impossible to guess and subtle gestures.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• jonathantf2 4y ago
  I miss the squeeze feature on my old Pixel 2 - I used it all the time and it was awesome. Shame they removed it
  • tgv 4y ago
    What's that? I'm another iPhone user who likes 3D touch, and I've seen a few Androids, but I've never heard of a squeeze function. Do you trigger some function by squeezing the sides?
    • jonathantf2 4y ago
      You could squeeze the bottom half of the phone to trigger the Google Assistant, can't remember if it was remappable or not.
• Lio 4y ago
  I actually used to turn 3D Touch off on my older iPhones. I just always use that long press on the space bar to move the cursor. 3D Touch is interesting from a technical point of view but it makes manufacture more complex and using the phone more complicated than it needs to be. I was always activating it by accident. When it was first announced I was excited that haptic feedback would allow us to feel the edges of the virtual keyboard keys and improve typing accuracy. That's not what we got and I've found very little utility in the current implementation sadly. It also makes it harder to get the screen replaced. Since I don't live near an Apple Store that's important to me. I want to be able to pop into a local locksmith and get them to change a broken screen while I wait. The alternative is either a long drive or sending the phone away for days on end. If Apple really wanted to impress me they would replace the dictation key on the keyboard which I regularly trigger by accident with something useful like an Undo button. I have never used dictation so this is just a daily irritation to me.
  • nishs 4y ago
    > I just always use that long press on the space bar to move the cursor. So the cursor navigation feature activates on long press of the space bar, in iPhone models that don't have 3D touch?
    • Lio 4y ago
      Yes, it works in all iPhones with or without 3D Touch.
  • ericabiz 4y ago
    I co-own third party repair shops (we are not Apple certified since we do more complex repairs) and the screens for the 6S-XS have 3D Touch on them even if they’re not replaced by Apple. I will say this, in 50,000+ 3D Touch iPhone screen repairs (conservative estimate) I don’t recall any complaints about non-working 3D Touch. I think probably 0.1% of iPhone users even knew it existed.
    • NonNefarious 4y ago
• irrational 4y ago
  I had no idea this spacebar to trackpad feature existed! It is awesome!
  • cdmckay 4y ago
    Someone showed me this a couple years ago and my mind was blown!
• sitkack 4y ago
  Lol, I am that guy (the one that buys the products that die in the market). I like 3d touch. It was so seamless you don't realize it is an additional feature.
• IncandescentGas 4y ago
  I wonder if reliability was a factor in ending this feature. 3D touch malfunctions badly with a slightly swelling battery pressing against the lcd backplate inside the phone. Or a bend in the phone chassis. The 6s case was bent for every person who carried it in their back pocket. I saw malfunctioning 3d touch several times every week back when I was in phone repair. Especially with carrier insurance refurbs, where the replacement parts were of especially poor quality. Carrier refurbs often had the cheapest batteries, screen assemblies and sometimes non original chassis.
  • josu 4y ago
    3D touch added 14g (+10.8%) and 2mm (+3%) to the iPhone 6s vs the 6.
  • Reason077 4y ago
    My daily phone is a beat-up iPhone X that I bought new on release, making it almost 5 years old. It has a cracked screen (dead OLED is slowly spreading out from the top-right corner), shattered back glass, battery at 81% health, and the earpiece speaker doesn’t work properly so to make a call I have to use a headset or speaker mode. But 3D Touch still works perfectly!
    • 4ggr0 4y ago
      My iPhone 12 mini is a bit over 1.5yrs old and has a 86% battery health. I hope this trend does not continue as fast or I guess I'll have to replace it sooner than later.
      • mathieuh 4y ago
        That sounds pretty fast, my 12 Pro Max is roughly the same age and at 96%
        • vladvasiliu 4y ago
          What's usually missing from these comparisons is how long people are actually using the phone and how they handle the battery. Mine is an iPhone 7 I bought refurbished back in February 2017. This phone is likely to have seen less use than a friend of mine's phone bought at the end of 2021. It spends 95% of its life connected to a power source (even when I actively use it), so I expect the battery to last quite some time.
• Uupis 4y ago
  Same here. I wanted to upgrade from Xs to the 13 mini while mini is in the lineup, but found myself missing 3D Touch too much. Probably gonna hold on to the Xs until its EOL unless something really compelling gets added before then.
• Daedren 4y ago
  3D Touch was a big UX problem, there was never a way to show the user that you could do it and where you could. Apple has a problem with discoverability in quite a lot of features. There's many small little things in iOS that users don't know about and likely will never find out about, perhaps because they want to keep the UI clean.
  • timomax2 4y ago
    Why do they refuse to give you a manual? Why are there no instructions. Drives me crazy.
    • null_object 4y ago
      > Why do they refuse to give you a manual? Why are there no instructions. There’s a whole Apple app - Tips - included with every iOS device, dedicated specifically to these small features. It’s updated by Apple with new tips and tricks regularly, and you can choose to be notified each time a new ‘episode’ is released.
      • frankfrankfrank 4y ago
        Tips is actually a great example of how Apple fails at this/discoverability. The tips in there are novice and below level at best. With none of the advanced features even discussed, let alone more obscure or hidden ones.
    • canarypilot 4y ago
      There is a large user manual available in “Books” ; https://books.apple.com/gb/book/iphone-user-guide/id1515995528 https://books.apple.com/gb/book/iphone-user-guide/id15159955... I imagine most iPhone users don’t know it is there!
      • samatman 4y ago
        See, I didn't know that, and I've had iPhones since the 4 (a grand total of four devices), and am the sort of person who reads the manual in general, and likes to know all the features of a device I spend time with. On the one hand, thanks for the tip! On the other hand, Apple has an enormous discoverability problem, it's getting worse, and they're responding by making the UX dumber instead of addressing it head on.
• nottorp 4y ago
  I'm glad you understood how to activate 3d touch as opposed to normal touch and long touch. I've had this iphone XS since it was a new model and I still haven't figured it out. This trackpad mode sounds interesting though, I'll try it :)
  • dan-robertson 4y ago
    I think the feature got more confusing as Apple started to phase it out. They dropped the feature where you could force-touch to select text (on e.g. a web page rather than typing) and press harder again to select eg sentences/paragraphs. They also made force touch and long press do the same thing in many cases. I think about the only place it works well is in the keyboard but sadly there are now a bunch of bugs there with replacements/corrections not interacting with the text suggestions properly (and they deleted the feature where pressing shift while replacing will capitalise/uppercase the suggested replacement)
    • nottorp 4y ago
      The one thing I remember was buying the phone when the model was like 6 months since launch, pressing on an app icon on the desktop and randomly getting either the 'move the apps' state or the context menu with apparently no logic to it. And nothing's changed since then. Sorry. It's too confusing.
      • boopmaster 4y ago
        but what you are describing here exists on newer models as well, sans force touch.. long press.
        • nottorp 4y ago
          On my xs when i think i long press i can get Two different results… and they seem random to me.
• Twisell 4y ago
  > But the ease of use and selection capability has been greatly reduced. You can still select text but it takes two hands (or fingers?) and I can’t seem to figure out how it delineates its boundaries so I end up never using it. Only now thanks to the OP I understand how to achieve this without 3D touch. Poor discoverability on this feature never ends.
  • TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    Same! I only just upgraded phones a couple weeks ago and the lack of 3D Touch was confounding when I made text errors! I didn’t know I could activate it with the spacebar but that works pretty well!
    • frankfrankfrank 4y ago
      It took me forever to learn how to select text again. I feel like Apple really kind of damaged itself by hiding things, not telling anyone properly, and then removing things because no one was using it because they had no idea it was there. It’s such a typical asinine corporate/communist/top down/command structure problem. problem
  • vosper 4y ago
    Could you explain further how to do it? I still don't get it :( I always just double-tap a word to select it and then drag the selection tabs to expand to what I want. If there's another way I'm interested to hear it.
    • wingerlang 4y ago
      Hold spacebar to start the cursor. Use 2nd finger tap on the keyboard, the selection markers will show up. Now use the first finger again to move left/right to select stuff. First time trying it for me but it seems.. odd, maybe need to get used to it.
      • graftak 4y ago
        The thing that trips me is that I need my initial finger to move about, I instinctively moved my second finger to move the second (selection) cursor.
• PinguTS 4y ago
  Yeah, missing this 3D Touch. The input experience (or AI supported typing) is getting worse and worse for me on the iPhone. Especially, if your are using different languages in parallel. For me it is my mother tongue German and my most second language English and sometimes using Spanish. In an (for me) unpredictable way, there are words replaced to "correct" typos. But, independent of the used keyboard language, which is completely ignored for this auto-correct, it replaces it with German word, when I write English and sometimes with English words when I type German. Then this forced touch was helpful to select the letters/word to re-write it correctly to make the sentence meaningful. But now, this whole selection process is completely broken (for me). Since the removal of force touch, when I try to go to a specific spot, it selects parts of the sentence in a completely (for me) unpredictable way. Then I have no chance to un-select anymore, so I have to replace the whole. The experience is getting worse and worse. I think peak iOS was in the past.
  • mft_ 4y ago
    I’ve been experiencing something similar recently, and for a while even thought it was just me getting worse at typing on such a small keyboard. However, the points you make are absolutely right, and in addition it has recently developed the annoying trait of sometimes choosing to replace previous words that I have specifically typed and selected.
  • konschubert 4y ago
    I don't disagree with you. But I think it's great that the keyboard language does not define the autocorrect language. The German keyboard has smaller-sized keys and it would drive me insane I think if I had to switch to the German keyboard in order to type German text.
    • vladvasiliu 4y ago
      You can change the keyboard layout per language. I type mostly in French (on an otherwise English language phone) and use French in QWERTY layout. For the special characters (é, à, etc), I long-press and choose whatever I need. Since I hate typing on the phone, I quite like using the suggestions, especially for words with multiple special characters.
• parski 4y ago
  3D Touch was supreme. I especially miss the keyboard thing and peek-and-pop.
• avnigo 4y ago
  I had a feeling this was gonna be about 3D Touch just from seeing the title. It was definitely one of my favorite features, and Force Touch isn't a drop-in replacement. With 3D Touch anywhere on the keyboard, you could apply pressure to start moving the caret (text cursor) around, but what was even more useful was being able to apply a little bit more pressure to start selecting text with incredible precision. With Force Touch, you can long press on the space bar till you get haptic feedback, then you can move the caret around freely. However, if you want to select text, you need to use a second finger on the keyboard after you start moving the caret around, but honestly it's an absolute mess to use; try it out, I can guarantee you won't be able to select what you were planning on. However, as much as I miss it every time I fail to accurately select text on iOS, I don't mourn its loss. Force Touch is adequate. It's just not a replacement, and seems a shame it was probably removed to reduce costs and hardware complexity, all at the cost of regression.
  • mike_pol 4y ago
    I was sure it was going to be about it as well! 3D touch was a really cool feature. I also find now that it’s a lot easier to activate the flashlight or camera on the Lock Screen since they are not ‘buttons’ any more
    • whywhywhywhy 4y ago
      Every time I unlock my phone I’m reminded that the stupid flashlight button can’t be turned off. The 3 times this year I’ve needed to use my flashlight are not worth the 20+ times it’s been accidentally running in my pocket because I held the wrong corner while pocketing my phone. Plus it’s in control centre anyway If you need it fast.
      • D13Fd 4y ago
        Wow I don’t agree at all. I use the flashlight all of the time, and I rarely if ever activate it accidentally. I actually used to hit it accidentally more often when it was a 3D touch button rather than a delay-based button.
• b93rn 4y ago
  I always used the cursor function, but did not know about the press again selection mode. I still have a iPhone 10, so i can still enjoy while it lasts.
• tomduncalf 4y ago
  3D Touch was a lovely feature but to be honest I’ve adapted to its replacements to the point where I hadn’t thought about it for months until reading this. I imagine the amount of engineering complexity on the hardware side for such a relatively niche feature just didn’t make sense, also the fact that it seemingly couldn’t scale to iPad sized screens. A shame, but probably a sensible move.
• wruza 4y ago
  My favorite keyboard feature: ^ ctrl-< < > ctrl-> V shiftlock cut cpy pst srch shr … That’s all I need to edit/select text instead of these glamour gestures. Assuming ctrl-likes use \b word boundaries. I’d also like to turn off input focus zooming in safari. Related, I’d also like to jumps 5s in videos rather than 15s. Not very useful to rewatch 15s when you missed a word or a visual.
• dash2 4y ago
  It was a feature with 1% of users who knew about it and who were its passionate defenders. This is exactly the sort of feature you should RUTHLESSLY kill off. If you do not, the end state of your software is that it is a collection of features, all of them known to 1% of your users, all passionately defended. Kudos to Apple.
  • thih9 4y ago
    Long press is in many ways an inferior (slower, less precise, easier to fire accidentally), its benefit is better discoverability. Why not work on making 3D Touch more discoverable? Sometimes the 1% of power users are right and not listening to them leads to bland and less useful products.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • baxtr 4y ago
    I tend to agree. Then again you could argue that iOS is a mature platform to allow for 1% functionalities, which are discovered step-by-step. I still discover awesome settings options through those Tik Tok movies.
  • mrweasel 4y ago
    Most of the improvements that I can think of for the iPhone (and iOS apps in general) would involve removing features. An example, there is a gesture that will open the camera app, I don't know what it is, but it triggers in my pocket all the time, draining the battery. I get why it's there, but most of the time it just makes things worse. I haven't used Android enough to know if it's the same issue, but the main problem is discoverability. iOS, and many apps, have a ton of features, but there isn't enough screen space to do hint to how to use them. There also isn't enough space to add more buttons. So we end up with these weird swiping motions, long press, 3D Touch or hard to hit icons. Maybe it's just me being old, but I'd recommend stripping a ton of features from phones and their apps. If you need to do anything more complicated, push people to use a device that's designed for higher levels of interaction.
    • 4y ago
• the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
  The most annoying thing about the spacebar thing is that it needs a space bar. So when an app forces a number only keyboard there is no way any more to move the cursor.
• wingerlang 4y ago
  I actually had to go check the keyboard cursor thing, I have fully switched to using the long press on the spacebar. Works totally fine to me. I wonder if having the extra space below on the iPhone X (etc) helps to alleviate the issues on other phones, where there is less/no room to select downwards without hitting the actual phone bezel. One thing that no one mentions for 3D touch is gaming. Being able to aim and just "click" with the same finger is really amazing. Makes FPS games on the phone feel way better.
• totetsu 4y ago
  Oh dear I just crashed my iphone UI by trying to press the language world icon while in the 'trackpad mode' moving the cursor as described at the end of this article. (in the notes tool. )
• dimman 4y ago
  As someone who used this feature every single day, for every single text input on the phone: I 100% agree. The replacement method works, but it is indeed subpar. It annoys me that my 3 generation newer phone is a downgrade in this regard, but I can live with it.
• tarsiec 4y ago
  I still use an iPhone XS and that's one of my favorite features that it has, I use it all the time and it's a shame it's not still there, kind of holding me back from upgrading
  • nishs 4y ago
    I use an iPhone XS too. I love this feature & did not know it was 3D touch-specific.
    • nishs 4y ago
      I was wrong about the last part of my comment. It isn’t entirely 3D touch specific. From the original post: “Fast forward to today, the trackpad mode and selection feature technically still exist albeit in a lesser form. If you long press (aka hold down) on the spacebar of your touch screen keyboard (which works on iPad too) you can get into trackpad mode.” Also confirmed by another commenter in this thread.
• lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  The big takeaway for me was >>> My guess is that people had no idea it was there. Likely it had very low usage statistics and so Apple cut it in order to... Right there. I am often frustrated that I cannot edit a URL in the address bar - but not frustrated enough to use a different phone or explore. What would be useful is some kind of "how to use your phones hidden features" guide on the phone (no not on a website somewhere an actual supported by Apple real tutorial). Then both I can find out and Apple can find the real ratio here - people who know how to use 3D whatever and who just don't bother.
  • frankfrankfrank 4y ago
    Funny enough, the infrastructure for that exists too, and you may not realize it … in the Tips app. What is lacking is the even just moderately advanced topics. I suspect that the long-press alternative in software was found to be sufficient alternative to not warrant the force-press. I wonder if this is where we are going on Mac too where, e.g., force press to trigger definitions of words is a godsend especially when leaving foreign languages,
  • happyopossum 4y ago
    > I am often frustrated that I cannot edit a URL in the address bar On an iPhone? You've always been able to do that...
    • lifeisstillgood 4y ago
      Really? how? To be clear, I mean if the irl is longer than the width of the visible address bar, I cannot move the cursor outside the visible box and bring the rest of the url into view. So for example I might want to edit a query param.
• chpmrc 4y ago
  I've recently switched to iPhone and this thread is so comforting. My friends thought I was insane when I told them that typing on Android (Samsung or Google keyboard) is much more accurate, fast and way less prone to errors (using autocorrect) than on an iPhone. And that's not even counting swipe mode! The difference is huge.
  • philliphaydon 4y ago
    Nothing beats the flow keyboard on the old windows phone. That was was the peak of typing on a phone. I still much prefer any keyboard over Samsungs tho. The Samsung default keyboard is the worst I’ve used.
    • 1ark 4y ago
      Just checked a short video of Word Flow. Isn't it the same as Gboard or Microsoft Swiftkey?
      • philliphaydon 4y ago
        I don't know why, but with Word Flow you could train it, teach it words, including swear words. GBoard / Swiftkey does its darnest to ensure that it will never select a swear word and always pick 'duck' but give me an option for 'fuck'. Flow you didn't need to be accurate, you could be 'close enough' and it figured out the word you wanted based on what you were writing. GBoard/Swiftkey get it wrong more often than I like.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• Nition 4y ago
  Re text selection, what I find annoying is that that you can't just tap with your finger on the text itself to place the cursor in an exact location. You can tap to place the cursor, but it always snaps to the end of a word. Why? My favourite iPhone feature that was removed though was being able to fully turn off WiFi from the Control Center (last seen in iOS 10).
  • grsmvg 4y ago
    You can then ‘grab’ the cursor and move it. Or just use the hold spacebar trick two merge those two steps into a single action.
    • Nition 4y ago
      Yeah, I just find it a bit strange that you can't just tap once for exact placement. I know from previous non-iOS phones that it's not that hard to get it in the right spot.
      • mixmastamyk 4y ago
        Works for me on the second tap.
        • Nition 4y ago
          If I tap twice it selects the whole word. Leaving more time between taps has the same result as one tap. iOS 15.1.
          • mixmastamyk 4y ago
            Don’t double tap. Tap once, wait a sec, tap again in center of word.
            • Nition 4y ago
              Doesn't work, maybe it's model-specific. I'm on a first gen iPhone SE.
• alister 4y ago
  What's missing from the article is a list of iPhones that had the feature: These devices support 3D Touch: iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone X, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max. -- https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205056 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205056
  • deleted 4y ago
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• Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Spacebar cursor selection is INCREDIBLY glitchy and frustrating and I use it daily...
• needle0 4y ago
  The replacement of “force touch on keyboard to move cursor” is “long-touch on space bar to move cursor”. This works fine for western languages where the key to input a space is large and centered, but some keyboards like the Japanese flick input keyboard look more like phone numpads where the middle of the keyboard is taken by the “number keys” (each key represents a consonant). The space key is located on the right hand edge of the screen, and while the “long-press to move cursor” shortcut still works, it’s only useful for moving the cursor leftwards since your finger is already at the righthand edge of the screen when the shortcut triggers. It’s quite an unfortunate casualty caught in the crossfire between i18n, feature discoverability, and hardware cost-cutting.
  • frankfrankfrank 4y ago
    It’s definitely a solvable problem.
  • busymom0 4y ago
    Why doesn’t Apple use the empty space below the keyboard on the iPhones? Long press there could do the same as long press spacebar.
• hericium 4y ago
  I didn't even knew that my favorite iPhone feature was listening to the music I want until Apple introduced forced shuffling, playing titles alphabetically and started disturbing built-in music player UX in order to push their online offering. It's a typical Cook's Apple experience to listen to 10 tracks from different albums, all called "Outro", after album chosen by me finishes playing with a track called "Outro" and is set to repeat.
  • WelcomeShorty 4y ago
    For me the complete opposite: I LOVE the shuffling with their library. Pick one song I shazamed and poof, I get to listen to "random" "identical" songs for hours. A gem.
    • hericium 4y ago
      To each their own. I would only like to have control over shuffling, like not being forced to turn it off several times a day. I have different kinds of music. When at the gym, classical music is the last genre from my library I'd like to listen. When listening to ambient during work I don't want to suddenly get hard rock or rap. Preferably no vocals at all. The iTunes.app was capable of playing the music I wanted. Things went sideways when it was renamed to Music.app.
  • wodenokoto 4y ago
    You can turn it off in settings somewhere. I really do enjoy albums ending, and think it is a poor UX choice to go to radio mode when an album is complete. However, for playlists, I think it is nifty, but afaik you can't have it both ways. It really should be a per playlist toggle at the bottom "continue on radio when all songs in this playlist have finished playing."
    • lancesells 4y ago
      You can turn it off with the infinity symbol. As far as UX choice I find radio mode helpful as I'm a painter and my hands are occupied and I'm usually in a focused mode.
• geuis 4y ago
  > The screen actually had pressure sensitivity built into the physical screen and it would respond to a more forceful push into the screen. I am soooo happy this physical feature is gone. Personally, I hated it. I'm still a fan of the SE (give me touchID or death). I still want a touchID phone with more advanced camera capabilities. This feature caused no end of confusion, even as an experienced iOS user. Completely fucked up any software trying to do long press detection. But even after adapting for that, the pressure differential for touching just didn't work.
• thom 4y ago
  I’ve only ever used 3D Touch accidentally and been annoyed by it. I still make accidental long touches in all sorts of apps and they do weird things. I do use the keyboard cursor thing but to be honest text entry on a touchscreen has never really been good for me. I don’t think I’ve ever typed a sentence correctly in 15 years of iPhones. Even with autocorrect I’m often having to go back. Selection, cut, paste are all terrible. Tap somewhere and hope it offers to select a word but sometimes it doesn’t. Try to copy some text on a web page oops it’s a link. Tap elsewhere and try to paste but sometimes it doesn’t. Try to extend a selection and get weird multiline behaviour I can’t explain. Maybe I have the world’s biggest thumbs but it’s constant aggro that you just end up internalising.
• the-golden-one 4y ago
  The only place 3D Touch remains active is on the flashlight button on the lock screen. If you have a phone that supports 3D Touch, give it a try. You’ll find that simply long pressing on the button doesn’t work, you have to apply a certain degree of pressure before it responds.
• nprateem 4y ago
  And samsung have replaced their previously excellent, immediate touch sensor for some under-screen bullshit that takes a few seconds and doesn't work half the time. I mean, it's not like anyone unlocks their phone about a hundred times a day...
• ninedays 4y ago
  There clearly was a discoverability issue with 3D Touch. When you knew which app supported the feature, it was awesome but there was no way of knowing in advance if there was support for it before using it. Long pressing an icon or anything just to see that nothing happens was just frustrating. Long term effect was that users probably felt this wasn't reliable/supported enough to use the feature at all or at least not in the scale Apple wanted. edit : fixed typos
  • makeitdouble 4y ago
    The interesting part to me is, replacements for 3D Touch aren't that much more discoverable: you'll need to be randomly long pressing icons, buttons, sometimes specific areas in apps to discover they have additional menus. Getting rid of 3DTouch feels to me more like a hardware cost reduction (+ harmonizing the system with the iPad) than anything.
• nishs 4y ago
  I didn't know this feature was 3D touch-specific. Why can't Apple make the feature activate on a regular "long press" for the other models?
  • nishs 4y ago
    follow up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32354824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32354824 so actually it works on long press right now.
• RektBoy 4y ago
  If you use anything from Apple you're living in a golden cage after all.
• rocbear 4y ago
  I really miss the keyboard cursor as it was in it's previous state. The game Knotwords has a similar feature that's based only on drag movement over the keyboard, I find it to be really helpful for navigation.
• divbzero 4y ago
  Looks like 3D Touch survived 4 years, appearing in: [1] – iPhone 6S – iPhone 6S Plus – iPhone 7 – iPhone 7 Plus – iPhone 8 – iPhone 8 Plus – iPhone X – iPhone XS – iPhone XS Max The feature was discontinued with the release of iPhone 11. [2] [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/does-iphone-have-3d-touch https://www.businessinsider.com/does-iphone-have-3d-touch [2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-discontinues-3d-touch-iphone-11-replaces-with-haptic-touch-2019-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-discontinues-3d-touch-...
• matsemann 4y ago
  > My guess is that people had no idea it was there. Most users don't know how to use half the iPhone's navigation features. And the problem here isn't the users, but that they are completely undiscoverable. At some point, I think the home-button had like 11 different functions based on how you pressed it and in what context. Everything to make things look "sleek".
• mdrachuk 4y ago
  I miss 3D Touch. It cut 300ms from many UI actions making you feel like a power user.
• mcintyre1994 4y ago
  I think this was also when they added the menu to apps, so you could 3d press Safari icon and go straight to new tab, or Twitter and straight to compose etc. I imagine its long press equivalent now is a lot better known though!
• m12k 4y ago
  Functionality that has no visual component is invisible to the point that it might as well not exist for 99% of users. Apple has done a lot to teach the built-in functionality like this (e.g. the swipe from top/bottom gestures). But a feature like 3D Touch requires individual apps to support it, and there's a chicken and egg problem here, since it's not worth it for the app developers to spend time on a feature that 99% of their users won't know exists. And because so few apps supported 3D touch, most users never learned to use it (they probably gave up after the first couple apps didn't do anything) and thus there was little pressure on developers to implement it. Neat as it was, I think this feature was doomed from the beginning for this reason.
• jmyeet 4y ago
  Apple, and Steve Jobs in particular, doggedly rejected having a second button on the mouse [1]. Why? Discoverability or rather the lack thereof. Personally I believe Apple was wrong here and basically lost the argument. The right-click standardized around a context menu. People generally understand this. So imagine my surprise when Apple introduced Force Touch on the iPhone. This added weight and cost to the iPhone for a feature with no discoverability or consistency. The closest we got was "preview". The author says: > My guess is that people had no idea it was there. But that's only half the problem. It might be there or it might not depending on the app and who knows what behaviour you'd get if it was there. Force/3D Touch I always considered a mistake along with: - Removing the orientation lock button from the iPad - Face ID (seriously, just give me a phone with Touch ID; put it on the back if you have to) - Zooming out in Safari takes you to the list of "tabs" and there's no way not to do this [1]: https://www.cultofmac.com/269222/steve-jobs-hated-idea-multi-button-mouse-designer-claims/ https://www.cultofmac.com/269222/steve-jobs-hated-idea-multi...
• p4bl0 4y ago
  Can't you just keep the version of the hardware that has this feature? Surely one does not need to use the very last iPhone model.
• whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  I just wish they’d make it so holding delete only did character by character. It always jumps to word by word at the wrong point and eats up way too much text, heck it even jumps to lines after a handful of words. It boggles my mind how they put up with it when they can change it.
• Kiro 4y ago
  One of the worst things to deal with when building web apps/games. So many issues caused by people accidentally triggering force touch when holding down a button in a game.
• baisq 4y ago
  I was happy that they removed 3D Touch because some stuff was simply inaccessible to iPhone SE users.
• dwighttk 4y ago
  For me cursor placement fails like 40% of the time. I guess because I didn’t get the vertical position correct? I have the insertion point in the place I want it, release, and the cursor flies back to its original position. It is pretty irritating. Especially the second time in a row.
• ChrisRR 4y ago
  > My guess is that people had no idea it was there That is my issue with so many of Apple's features. Apple fans are so happy to shout "it just works. You just have to double tap, or three finger swipe or hold your mouse in the corner or press harder on the screen" If the UI doesn't tell me about those hidden methods, then the feature doesn't exist.
• peanut_worm 4y ago
  I have an extremely outdated version of iOS and I still have this feature lol
  • justusthane 4y ago
    It hasn't been removed from newer versions of iOS (yet), it's just not supported by newer hardware. An iPhone XS or older with the most up-to-date iOS still has 3D touch.
• zabaki 4y ago
  Not a day goes by, where I don’t miss this feature. I was so sad to lose it when I updated to the newest iPhone.
• scoot 4y ago
  While playing with the (inferior) "long-press space bar for trackpad" feature, I discovered that OCR is now built into the text field (as if iOS 15 apparently). Tap the text field (twice if not already selected) and you'll have tooltip with "Scan Text". Selecting that turns on the camera, replacing the keyboard, and text under the camera is temporarily inserted, with an "insert text" button. Nice!
• martijn_himself 4y ago
  This is cool but I think technically minded people vastly overestimate how many people would use it even if they knew about it. It's just another thing to remember. I have an iPhone 8 and the 3D Touch version of it is clever but it doesn't seem to activate all the time (I'm not sure if that is a bug or not). Apple probably collects usage statistics and knows no one (by approximation) uses it so they scrap it. That's sad, but understandable as well.
• qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
  > press and hold on safari address bar for voice search > press and hold tab icon in safari for closing tabs and creating new private tab > press and release on the navigation dots at the bottom of Home Screen to get an overview of all screens and you get to show or hide the screens
• tardismechanic 4y ago
  Genuine TIL: long press spacebar in iOS for precise text selection Well what do you know...
• nerdjon 4y ago
  I really do miss force touch. I long felt like once all iPhones (that supported the most recent iOS) had the feature than they could really take it and run with it in iOS. But this never happened. But the usability improvements of it were great. In music ALL the time I would hold down on a song to pull up the menu, keep my finger down and scroll down to add to next, and lift up to select it. One swipe and I did what I wanted. I could do that quicker than it takes it to register that I am holding down in the first place now. It worked the same was as anything on the Menu on a Mac (holding down and releasing doing the command) and it just felt super intuitive. I won't deny that it had a discoverability issue, but that feels like the wrong reason to remove the technology. I am glad this technology still exists on the watch, which has an OS that was always designed with this in mind. So I think it works well there. I long hope this comes back. But I have to imagine there is a reason this never came to the iPad so maybe that was a major contributor to it being cut.
• everyone 4y ago
  I was just thinking, was the only time some solid human interface design work was put into practice at a large scale, when apple and MS copied the work by Xerox parc? Like, everything else since then seems to just have been some stupid gimmick driven by the bean counters and not any evidence based approach. I assume modern academic human interface designers have been going quietly insane for the past few decades.
• jasonladuke0311 4y ago
  Totally agree with the author, I loved this feature and copying parts of text/URLs is more difficult now.
• slategruen 4y ago
  Why do I feel like Apple's threshold for removing features is really low?
• asciimov 4y ago
  I am surprised that neither Apple nor Google have spent much time trying to address the discoverability of the features in their touch devices. On the one hand, I guess it's nice, I don't have to field calls from my family asking how to do something on the phone, or how to turn off a feature. (Well except for that time my mom accidentally turned on emergency sos mode and couldn't figure out how to turn it off for an hour.) On the other hand, sometimes I would do something unexpected that seems cool, but now I don't know what that feature is called or how to purposely do it again. Was it triple back tap or long tap-short tap- long tap the volume button or maybe it was septuple swipe across the home screen... I'll never know.
• wojcikstefan 4y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree with every single word in this post. I also mourn this feature's death daily. Being able to force-push on the spacebar is not good enough of a replacement.
• rsynnott 4y ago
  I can understand why they killed it (I suspect the average user was simply completely unaware that it existed, and no doubt getting rid of it made the physical implementation simpler) but I do think it's a shame; it was by far the best text-handling on a touch device I've seen before or since. I do wonder if it'll come back at some point.
• circa 4y ago
  Long live 3D Touch. I miss my XS Max only because of that.
• xt00 4y ago
  Maybe I’m in the minority here but I really did not like the feature and many people I tried to explain the feature to were confused that it existed.. “no no don’t tap the screen, you need to PUSH on the screen to make it do the action”.. and I would get a look like “huh?? Push on the screen? Why what’s that gonna do..” people saying pushing hard on the screen is intuitive seemed to live in a different bubble of people than I interacted with..
  • drclau 4y ago
    I initially liked it, but gradually grew to dislike it. Having to press hard on the screen of a hand-held device that would be quite expensive to repair if dropped is just not a good idea. I ended up reducing the force setting to the minimum, and still felt it wasn't practical.
    • glhaynes 4y ago
      I don't think it was likely to damage the display (though, yeah, it feels iffy), but there's just something about having to exert force when you're used to lightly tapping that just feels … burdensome. No less burdensome than its tap-and-hold replacement, so, I don't miss it.
      • drclau 4y ago
        I want to clarify, I was not saying the finger pushing on the screen can damage the display, but rather that doing so increases the risk of dropping an already thin and slippery device.
  • failTide 4y ago
    so I'm relatively anti-phone and have been for a while. There was a period of time where I didn't have a smartphone for a few years. When I started using an iPhone again, I realized I couldn't figure out how the heck to delete apps. It was kind of infuriating. I eventually had to look it up online, but the answer wasn't the top one. After reading enough answers I realized the 3d touch was the reason, and that I was touching too lightly or too hard or whatever. I was so out of the loop that I had no idea the feature existed. When I eventually looked it up, all I could think was "how the hell was I supposed to figure that out?".... maybe they explained it during one of those apple conferences everyone watches?
• joshstrange 4y ago
  Something related that drives me batty is you can't long press notifications on the iPad. Like let's say you get a Reminders notification and you want to snooze it for 1 hour (don't get me started on how stupidly limited your snooze options are or the many other failings of Reminders). On the phone you just press and hold (used to be 3D touch) and the context menu comes up but this doesn't work on the iPad for no good reason. Neither device has 3D touch anymore, it's just a tap and hold but on the iPad the only way to bring up that menu is to swipe the notification down slightly and then the menu opens. It makes me angry every single time I try to take an action on a notification on my iPad.
  • happyopossum 4y ago
    > Neither device has 3D touch anymore The iPad never had 3D Touch.
    • joshstrange 4y ago
      Right but I'm saying they could implement force touch, or whatever they are calling "press and hold", on the iPad since it's not 3D touch dependant but for some reason they don't and it's maddening.
• sroussey 4y ago
  3D Touch had 256 levels of pressure. But it it was replaced with Forced touch (hard press vs normal press), nothing would have been lost. I wish they would bring it back via Force Touch on iPhones.
• tomp 4y ago
  TL;DR: his favourite feature (hard click on keyboard to move cursor) was not removed (just relegated to "hard click on spacebar")
• h1ms3lf 4y ago
  I don’t understand this post, the force touch is still there at least in the pro version of the latest iPhone, don’t know about the other models. Also the feature to position your courser is still there, just press harder on the space key, Apple confined it to that key/area
  • flutas 4y ago
    > I don’t understand this post, the force touch is still there at least in the pro version of the latest iPhone, don’t know about the other models. Haptic Touch and 3D Touch are different things[0] and the feature was removed after the iPhone XS line. 3D touch could actually measure the amount of force you put into the screen, it wasn't simply a "long press" like Haptic Touch is. > Also the feature to position your courser is still there, just press harder on the space key, Apple confined it to that key/area Yeah, but it's neutered in 3 ways at least. 1. With 3D Touch you didn't have to confine it to the space bar. 2. With 3D Touch you could press harder after going into cursor mode, and it would start selecting text. 3. With 3D Touch you didn't have to wait for a long press to register to activate it. You can see an example of it in this video[1] [0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205056 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205056 [1]: https://youtu.be/XlcCgiYF2Fs?t=26 https://youtu.be/XlcCgiYF2Fs?t=26
  • ec109685 4y ago
    It’s not force touch, it’s long touch now.
• hnrodey 4y ago
  I truly do not understand what the poster is mourning? I'm on iPhone 13 Pro Max using the latest iOS and this all seems to work as I expect...
  • flutas 4y ago
    > I truly do not understand what the poster is mourning? I'm on iPhone 13 Pro Max using the latest iOS and this all seems to work as I expect... Your iPhone 13 has Haptic Touch, not 3D Touch. Haptic Touch and 3D Touch are different things[0] and the feature was removed after the iPhone XS line. 3D Touch could actually measure the amount of force you put into the screen, it wasn't simply a "long press" like Haptic Touch is. The feature has also been made worse in at least 2 ways. 1. With 3D Touch you didn't have to confine it to the space bar. 2. With 3D Touch you could press harder after going into cursor mode, and it would start selecting text. 3. With 3D Touch you didn't have to wait for a long press to register to activate it. You can see an example of it in this video[1] [0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205056 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205056 [1]: https://youtu.be/XlcCgiYF2Fs?t=26 https://youtu.be/XlcCgiYF2Fs?t=26
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• todd3834 4y ago
  I read this wondering if it was going to be my favorite removed feature 3D Touch as well. Specifically for selecting text on the keyboard. I actually held off on buying a new phone for an extra couple years not to lose it. However, I didn't know about the space bar alternative until after I upgraded. Honestly I don't even miss 3D touch after a little adjustment period. I forgot I don't have it. So the new alternative works great for me
• jcpst 4y ago
  Woah, that is cool, I had no idea. I will definitely be using this.
• js-fella 4y ago
  I really liked this 3D touch. Especially the 3D touch trackpad feature, but I loved the 3D touch on the left side of the screen and gesturing to the right to trigger multitasking window. It was like the gesturing interactions the iPhone X brought but before the iPhone X. Pretty sweet feature and I liked it much more than using the home button
• iso1631 4y ago
  The thing I really miss is in apple maps on car play. Until a few months back you could press the big direction button to turn voice directions on and off, really easy to do while driving without looking at the screen. Now it's press in the right part of the screen, press a tiny button, press another tiny button
• uplifter 4y ago
  iOS dev here who’s built apps using the force touch feature, in my opinion it never got much traction with developers because the standard ui toolkit elements were never extended to make use of pressure touch. So instead of being able to create UIs by connecting storyboard outlets to function calls like probably 95% of iOS app UI development, a dev would have to drop down to and override the lower level calls to touchesBegan, touchesMoved and touchesEnded functions that govern the phases of a touch where the force pressure information was available, a much more involved and tricky coding and debbugging experience. But if you were willing to do that, whole new interface possibilities open up because you have an entirely new dimension to work with! I made a music instrument app where position on screen controls note/frequency and pressure controls amplitude and it works very smoothly[0]. But all the established paradigms that devs and users know revolve around 2D, so to take advantage of the force touch you have to both invent a new paradigm and teach it to users, all while supporting devices without 3D touch or losing that share of the market. There weren’t enough takers or it didn’t happen fast enough so Apple decided it wasn’t worth keeping, which is understandable but also kinda tragic in my admitedly biased opinion. [0] Xalophone digital musical instrument incorporating 3D Touch: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/xalophone/id1420669553 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/xalophone/id1420669553
• MiddleEndian 4y ago
  "Why do users disable automatic updates?"
• chrisandchris 4y ago
  > What really blew my mind was that if you pushed harder anywhere on the keypad it would go into trackpad mode and you could move the cursor in the text you were typing and quickly edit, delete, and fix things. One thing that annoyed me quite much when I received my6S Plus was that fixing typos felt clunky (couldn't move the cursor not that easy as before). If I just would have known that 2 years earlier, I would still have a lot more colorized hair... I love that feature!
• mmustapic 4y ago
  > I can’t push anywhere on the keyboard anymore to activate it. I now have to move all the way to the spacebar to activate it. "All the way" is just moving the finger a couple of cm. The main difference is that 3d touch instantly activated the touchpad, now there is a small delay of 0.25s. Not a bad compromise if it means removing some hardware.
• aquanext 4y ago
  I agree both about the keyboard feature and 3D Touch in general. Just because some people can't figure out how to use right-click or force touch, doesn't mean it shouldn't be there for the people who can figure it out. I feel like it shouldn't have been removed and that the experience of editing text is objectively worse now than it used be. I used that keyboard feature the exact same way all the time.
  • mrehler 4y ago
    I agree that removing 3D Touch makes text editing worse (presumably — my XS Max still has it and I’ll discover this fall), but if you step back, hopefully you can understand its removal. Adding an entire extra layer to the display was far from ‘free’ from a design perspective. That extra layer really limited design options and its removal saw immediate jumps in battery life attributable to the space its removal saved. There are all sorts of things out there a lot of people don’t figure out, or old features that new users never discover, but they require maintenance of code — this required a component, and saw poor adoption amongst many, many devs. Apple surely deserves some blame for it never taking off, primarily for a lack of discoverability. They added this new interaction after 7 years of a well-established and simple model, and didn’t give any visual indications for where you should be trying to use it. Plus, it was never on iPads, and only made it to iPhone models for four generations (6S, 7, 8/X, and XS — and it wasn’t on the XR). It was a great idea, and I still wish they doubled down on it, but it makes perfect sense for them to have let it go for other advantages that ultimately will be used by more people and sell more phones.
  • lolsal 4y ago
    > I agree both about the keyboard feature and 3D Touch in general. Just because some people can't figure out how to use right-click or force touch, doesn't mean it shouldn't be there for the people who can figure it out. I feel like it shouldn't have been removed and that the experience of editing text is objectively worse now than it used be. I used that keyboard feature the exact same way all the time. As a developer, it'd be nice if I didn't have to support a minority. I appreciate that iOS streamlines the experience that I have to develop for.
• Wistar 4y ago
  I never knew about the force touch version of the trackpad feature but I use the heck out of the current version. I guess I'm glad to be spared the pain of missing the earlier version.
• jacobsenscott 4y ago
  Long touch/force touch etc are all terrible for anyone who has lost fine motor control in their hands. I guess because the people who design these interface are all young and dexterous they don't realize a single tap can take over a second, and modulating the amount of pressure on the screen can be impossible.
  • NonNefarious 4y ago
    They're also a dereliction of the job of DESIGN. These are a lazy, undiscoverable, and ineffective attempt to avoid doing the necessary work to make a GUI: a GRAPHICAL user interface.
  • olyjohn 4y ago
    Accessibility is never a priority in the software world.
  • Longhanks 4y ago
    Then don’t use it? Why restrict products to a subset of features just because some people are unable to use them? Apple has always provided accessibility settings to disable 3D Touch if people had issues with accidentally triggering the feature.
    • jacobsenscott 4y ago
      Many people have no choice but to use long touch because they can't tap fast enough. Are you able to navigate to the accessibility settings using only long touch? I don't know. But I bet not.
• uxamanda 4y ago
  This explains so much. I didn't realize this feature was removed, and I just assumed that I had somehow changed my settings to add a delay. For how I used it, long press still works pretty well, but now you have to "trust" that it is working during the delay.
• NonNefarious 4y ago
  3-D Touch, Force Touch, whatever... it's lazy, undiscoverable UI. If there's a proper, disclosed affordance to do the same things... then I guess they are harmless. But if there is ANY compromise made to implement them, good riddance.
• boopmaster 4y ago
  I sometimes try to use this feature on newer "long press" models. Like trying to "push/pop" an image out larger because it is so tiny in the screen... and nothing happens... I'm just mashing real hard on the screen.
• petarb 4y ago
  I use 3D Touch on the daily to move the cursor around when typing on my XS Max. Definitely a feature I will miss when I get a new iPhone and it will take some time to get use to
• alkonaut 4y ago
  Any feature cut is going to be someone's pet feature. That doesn't mean one shouldn't be cutting features. Even if there is no replacement. Even if you lose that customer.
• GuB-42 4y ago
  Slightly related but a feature that I miss is the short lived "Air View" in Samsung Galaxy S4 and S5. It allows you to trigger actions by hovering your finger above the screen. Samsung implementation was a bit gimmicky, gimmicks were the hallmark of Samsung during that time, but it is extremely useful for one thing: hover targets on web pages. It actually makes sites that are completely unusable on other phones usable again, and not only that, it is very intuitive. And the best part is that it costs next to nothing to make and it doesn't take any space or make anything more fragile, if I am not mistaken it is just a few tweaks on the way the capacitive touchscreen sensor is driven. So why not keep it? UI wise Samsung was a bit clunky but it doesn't mean it doesn't have potential. 3D touch on the other hand is probably a bit more expensive as it requires extra components (pressure sensor). Also, pressure sensitive devices have a long history of being failures, but contactless tech is used all the time, the closest would be digitizers, they all support hovering and it is put to good use. I don't have anything against 3D touch, I think it is nice to have and cheap, the ability to use your phone as a scale is also a nice gimmick but between 3D touch and hovering, I would have bet on hovering. In the end, we have neither...
• sangnoir 4y ago
  When 3D touch was introduced, I made a comment on HN that stated Apple failed to learn the "Menu" button lesson from Android (it was around that time that Android was dropping support for the menu button). I'm not a UX specialist, but even I could connect the dots on how 3D touch was just the iOS version of the long-deprecated Android menu button: useful, but with non-existent discoverability. Additionally, apps would support it inconsistently, so most users wouldn't know the functionality exists at all, and of those that do know about it, sometimes the feature does nothing at all.
• hollowpython 4y ago
  I'm confused, why do people need to miss the feature? If it's that important to them, just don't buy the newest iphone.
• quitit 4y ago
  The real kicker was when they removed it from watchOS, where it was used extensively in the OS. So one day your “3D touch” enabled watch (as it was called) no longer supported those functions. (Yes the OS provided alternatives, but unlike the iPhone the functionality was removed entirely even for people who still had the hardware.)
• archeopetrix 4y ago
  Even before apple introduced the 3D Touch for trackpad feature, there was a Jailbreak tweak called SlideSelection. IMHO it was an even better solution. All you had to do was drag your finger left from the backspace key and the caret would start gliding. This was faster than having to force touch or touch-wait on spacebar. Also for selection you could double tap backspace and slide your finger.