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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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