Why Apple's 3D Touch failed miserably | Hacker News Reader

Why Apple's 3D Touch failed miserably

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21 pointssolarkraft19 comments

It is the number 1 feature for me when writing text. I move between letters with accuracy and I don’t have to move my finger over the letters. Which often covers the letter I want to find.

I can’t believe it’s not in the XR.

Fully agree to that! It's the best cursor movement solution that currently exists on phones.

Since someone mentioned that iOS12 now includes a solution that works without 3D touch by long-pressing spacebar I tried that too: It's not really a replacement. Since you start touching at the lowest-end of the screen scrolling upwards is awkward. It feels less precise than the 3d touch variant, and selecting works requires another hand to tip the screen.

Going from my iPhone 8 to an Xr seems like a step back to me in this regard. And I'm not willing to invest in the Xs.

i have used an iphone X for one year, and there is no force touch feature that you describe.

Yes there is. In a text field (like the reply box when you tell me I’m wrong), hard-press on the keyboard. The characters on the keyboard disappear and the keyboard essentially becomes a trackpad for moving the cursor.

This doesn’t work if you soft-touch for too long. Then it gets stuck in character selection mode. But if you quickly and firmly press, you’ll get the cursor precision movement mode.

You missed my point. Features like this due because of poor discoverability.

Then say that instead of asserting that it doesn’t exist. I agree, there is a discoverability problem with 3D Touch.

iOS 12 introduces this feature to devices without 3D Touch. Just press and hold the space bar until the characters on the keys disappear.

On iOS 12, iPhone 6s Plus ( which has 3D Touch ), 3D Touch for moving between text doesn't work anymore and requires using it on Space Bar. ( Anyone knows why ? )

So three years after its introduction, its only major use is for moving between text. And if it were so good you would bet all the Android phones would have copied it. And so far none of them did. If by 2020 we still don't have an killer feature for this I question whether that extra $15-20 BOM cost as well as internal space for battery is worth it. Subtracting some display cost for supporting 3D Touch, we are paying roughly ~RSP $50 for this one feature.

There was a potential rather aggressive - not quite killer - app on the iPad Pro, which was multitouch pressure sensitivity for music applications.

Poly aftertouch is missing from most keyboards, and it wouldn't have taken much to turn the iPad Pro into a virtual Roli Seaboard.

But so far there's been no 3D Touch on any version of the Pro. So that never happened.

The other everyday UI applications aren't very interesting. IME it's too hard to gauge touch accurately to use the feature for anything useful, so most of the time it just gets in the way.

It took me forever to figure out that you can force push on a picture then swipe up to give me sharing options.. where as just pushing lightly and holding brings up a menu right away — or did before.. so it definitely felt like a solution looking for a problem and in fact added a degree of freedom to the UI that didn’t need to be there.. for example while it might sound clever to add the ability to say double click keys on your keyboard for separate functions it basically means you have to divide your motor memory up into multiple areas. Anyway, I suspect very few people would notice if 3D Touch died.. I hope it goes away soon.. so lame.. sure the technology might be cool but not helpful on my phone..

Personally, it was always hard for me to figure out how much of the utility of 3D touch could just be achieved with long pressing. With the time that it takes to press down your finger, you're basically long pressing anyway

Also, duration is easier to control than the force of the press. In other words, it's harder to accidentally perform a long press than to accidentally perform a 3D touch.

Personally i don't have this experience. I find 3d touch way faster than a press and hold. I use it all the time to open links in new tabs in safari, its basically a right click. Instead of "tap, wait a second, open in background" its "press in and swipe up, open in background"

Although the functionality is mostly the same, it feels so much faster to me.

Considering 3D Touch is still in the iPhone Xs and iPhone Xs max, I don’t think it has failed. Personally I use it all the time while using my phone for notifications and the quick app actions.

Dead is probably too strong but it is pretty telling of Apple's internal thoughts on the feature that they would leave it off a new phone

Somewhat related, the early PlayStation 2 fighting gamegame, The Bouncer, used pressure sensitive buttons for "heavy" vs "light" attacks. It was cool but I don't think I've seen any similar games since.

Back when racing games still used the cross button for accelerate lots used the pressure-sensitive face buttons. Some sports games used them for light/heavy actions. The Metal Gear Solid series did as well, for aiming vs shooting your weapon.

> Or maybe the replacement for the 3D touch technology could be the addition of Apple Pencil support (something that has been expected in the last two years) and the introduction of an Apple Pencil Mini and special iPhone cases with pencil holders.

Yes, please.

And you don't need any special iPhone cases, just copy the way Samsung invented for S-Pen capable gadgets a long ago.

The root causes are:

0. There's no affordance in the regular UI/UX indicating 3D Touch is available.

1. It's awkward.

2. It's too much like long press when a longer press would've done the same without adding more hardware.

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