My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement | Hacker News Reader

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

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432 pointskoinedad359 comments

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.

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

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.

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.

I just don’t believe how that would be possible considering they both require holding the same corner just one pressing harder.

I just want a way to completely remove it for the majority of us who are not wandering around in pitch black.

I think I’ve unintentionally trained myself to hold the phone on it’s sides when pocketing it, for this reason, now that you mention it.

I don’t think I’ve ever had the flashlight accidentally left on (not in a long time, anyway).

I don’t know what you mean by force touch. Wasn’t that just Apple’s name for the action of pressing harder on 3D Touch devices?

The screen was actually presssure sensitive with a fair amount of precision. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch

Interesting, so there was a patent claim settled at the start of 2018 over this, and the iPhones released at the end of 2018 had the feature removed. I wonder how much of an impact that had, versus usability / weight / cost considerations.

Yes, they meant to say Haptic Touch.

IIRC:

Force Touch is something supported by 2015+ MacBook trackpads (you can push harder to effectively middle-click something) and 3D Touch was the iPhone screen tech that did the same thing, which has been replaced with Haptic Touch (equivalent to Android's "long press").

Oh wow, I never knew this existed.

It seems the selection can only grow and on both sides, which is the main problem.

If they showed the cursor with a different color than the selected text, and if they shrink and grow the selection as you move, I think it could be pretty nice: select the starting point of the selection, and select only what’s in between the original cursor and the moving one.

Alas it’s more like painting a selection at the moment, with an invisible brush.

The problem here is that the “move left to expand left” and “move right to expand right” doesn’t map mentally to the way a cursor works.

With a traditional cursor, it places an anchor wherever you’ve moused down and then drags the selection around that anchor.

Whereas with Haptic Touch selection, there’s no anchor, so you find yourself selecting text you didn’t mean to. I’m sure that once you’ve gotten used to it, it’s a nice feature; but it’s not intuitive if you’re not accustomed to it (which seems to be the majority of folks).

I enabled arrows keys on every single keyboard on the Android devices I owned. I use them to move the cursor and fix mistakes, usually by tapping and adjusting with the arrows. Faster than attempting to tap at the right spot. Are there no arrows on iOS keyboards?

> Oh wow, I never knew this existed.

iOS UI in a nutshell.

When I worked at Apple training people about the first iPhone generations they always said stuff like "it SHOULD be intuitive, we dont WANT a tutorial" I chuckled then, but add 15 years of changes on something and I don't know how that was ever going to be possible.

Huh, it's actually been 15 years since the iPhone came out. God damn it, now I feel old...

Tips is underrated. I think back then people just didn’t want a thick manual (also available in the Apple Books store) just to get value out of their phones, but Tips fills the need of providing some guidance as changes occur.

What is Tips?

It is an App installed on current iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. It just outlines features in the products, e.g. new iOS 15 features, “Essentials”, What’s new in watchOS 8, “Health”, “Beyond Basics”, “AirPods Max”, “AirPods”. I think various sections show up depending on what you buy or add to your Apple ID, and usually I’m able to learn a few things a year from it that I missed in the announcements or didn’t see covered elsewhere.

I hear this complaint a lot, but what is the solution exactly? Cramming labeled buttons for every possible action onto every screen? There's not a lot of space to work with, and even less when the touch targets have to be large enough for a big fat thumb to press accurately/reliably.

You can do most of the things that most users need to do just knowing how to tap icons and swipe up to go home. I don't think it's such a big issue that there are some power user features that you either discover by messing around or word of mouth.

Unobtrusive GUI indicators - small tabs that suggest pulling, textures to suggest numbers of fingers or tapping actions etc. Add a menu item to turn visual hints off if desired, but have the UI be discoverable by default.

> It seems the selection can only grow and on both sides, which is the main problem.

I could have sworn it used to work like how you'd expect, where it's anchored from the place you started highlighting. I got my first iPhone, the 12 mini, when it came out. So end of 2020, and I thought that was how text selection worked when I first got it, then it seemed at some point, perhaps after an update it started working where it would only grow the selection and you couldn't unselect if you accidentally went too far. I thought they introduced a bug but it hasn't changed since then. I have no source for this, only my own memory, but maybe someone else can tell me I'm correct/incorrect about that?

The current implementation is way too hard to use. Especially if, for example, you're selecting something starting on the far right side of a line to the far left side of the same line. You have to thread the needle of the above and below lines like a game of Operation, because if you go too high or too low, you'll accidentally end up selecting that entire line.

Force Touch would have been usable for me if I could just disable its vibration without having to disable it on the whole phone, I don't understand why they don't add special settings to do things like this. I hate that anytime I want to move the cursor and long press the space bar my phone has to vibrate.

I'm curious, how did the haptic feedback that indicates that you've enabled the feature make it unusable? FWIW its replacement is the same in that respect.

I hate notifications and talking on the phone, and after years I developed a pavlov reaction to it whenever my phone vibrates or makes a sound so I keep that at a minimum for important notifications, I used to love the samsung notification led but the iphone doesn't have that, so having a haptic feedback whenever I want to move the cursor (which is lots of times) makes me cringe.

> However, as much as I miss it every time I fail to accurately select text on iOS, I don't mourn its loss

Yes, it's slightly worse now but for a greater cause and the greater cause, IMHO, is the unified interaction model on mobile devices. If not all devices and apps are using it there's no reason to having it.

In the Android world there are tons of exotic stuff, novel ideas and even "standards" that go nowhere unless Apple implements it.

There is a magic in general availability. I think, if all Apple devices had it, it could have been possible to rely on its existence and build the UI with that assumption in mind. With just some devices having it, you need to have few versions of the UI to handle each case.

I too enjoy the removal of innovation and excellence in the quest for equality comrade

> I too enjoy the removal of innovation and excellence in the quest for equality comrade

I think you misunderstood. This is not an argument for equality at all, the problem with patchy support is that few bother to implement features against because it costs time and money and as a result fades into usbcuirity.

Having uniform platform is a very effective for innovations success. It makes sense for Apple and the developers to have the hardware based 3D touch with a software based alternative so that it can work on all devices the same way.

> There is a magic in general availability. I think, if all Apple devices had it, it could have been possible to rely on its existence and build the UI with that assumption in mind. With just some devices having it, you need to have few versions of the UI to handle each case.

The way you get there is by putting it into everything for several years.

Cutting it after three is the opposite of working for that greater cause.

What if it's not feasible on iPad?

There's a capacitor layer behind the screen and there's a tiny actuator for vibration. I don't see how it wouldn't be.

For some reason, no iPad had it. Maybe it becomes problematic on large screens, maybe the user experience degrades on large screens because of simple physics i.e the the strength needed for applying pressure becomes uncomfortable since it will act as a lever in the hands of the user?

Maybe the force the user can apply when iPad is on a table(no lever effect) and when is handheld(strong lever effect, user needs counterforce on the other end of the screen to achieve firm press) is far too different to reliably activate the gesture?

Tiny actuator? The Taptic Engine is quite large.

Not compared to a tablet.

I’ve been so sad since upgrading my 6s about the loss of 3D Touch. I didn’t know that you can hold on the space bar now!!! Thank you for making me love my 13 mini even more now :):)

It isn't the same though, since trying to move the cursor down moves your finger off the touch screen. You can only move it down one line at most, and not reliable.

It's speed sensitive. I just tested in the notes app and was able to move down 6 lines moving slowly or 10 lines moving quickly.

You must have a device with 3D touch. That's physically impossible with a new iPhone using the space bar.

No, it's a new iPhone 13 Pro.

> Oh you like the mini? Well we're taking that away next.

– Apple

Works for me. I tend to keep my phone for 5-7 years! I had a 4 -> 6s Plus -> 13 mini.

Never been able to get the same size phone twice even if I wanted to.

> but what was even more useful was being able to apply a little bit more pressure to start selecting text with incredible precision.

That is not how I remember it. I remember text being selected left and right at random for no apparent reason when trying to move the cursor.

Yeah—I'm a reasonably dextrous person, but had to disable 3d touch on iOS and whatever the fancy pressure thing is on recent macbook touchpads, to make them usable. Constant mistakes with either turned on.

I will probably soon add an old 3D Touch iphone to my small Human Machine Interface hall of fame along with the old click wheel iPod Classic.

They probably removed it because nobody was using it and they couldn't figure out how to teach people, while spending extra $ to add it into phones.

As if they put any effort whatsoever into teaching or UI discoverability these days. If there was a tutorial app I would have used it, but I have repeatedly had to use Google to find unrelated blog sites describing how to accomplish things in the iOS interface.

Cynically, it feels like they think everyone should already "just know" how the various gestures work, which is obnoxious and user hostile.

As I understand it 3D touch's functionality per app depended on the app author, so the discoverability problem is not that simple.

As someone who only occasionally has to use macOS and iOS for work. The gestures and key combos required to do even the most basic things are insane.. and there is (almost) zero discoverability or affordances for them. On iOS gestures with multiple fingers, on macOS keyboard shortcuts with 3 or 4 keys.

I also dont often use Linux, but I could try some new distro with a completely different windows manager I have never seen before and I can figure it out and be happily computing in no time.

apple stuff always requiring searching on the internet to find out how how to do even most basic functions.

Also, not relevant, but I gotta mention as it grinds my gears so bad.. The only reason I have to use macOS is that it's required to build to iOS, which is just uniquely egregious. That sort of business should actually be illegal. Hopefully it will be in EU soon.

> there is zero discoverability

The shortcuts associated with menu items are shown in the menu item. I realize that there other discovery problems with keyboard shortcuts (on all platforms) but there is non-zero discoverability for "the most basic things" on Mac OS.

Gesture discoverability is much closer to zero, IMHO.

Yeah fair enough, I was being hyperbolic, edited my comment to be more accurate.

what you mean most people don't go explore every single page of the System Preferences when they get a new computer and look at all the helpful animations in the Gestures pane, I'm shocked

(yeah this is the computing equivalent of a locked file cabinet in a disused toilet stall in a dark basement with a sign on the door that says "Beware The Leopard")

> yeah this is the computing equivalent of a locked file cabinet in a disused toilet stall in a dark basement with a sign on the door that says "Beware The Leopard"

OTOH it makes complete sense to have a look at the Trackpad pane to see how it works. It’s not like it’s hidden behind a defaults command line, and it even has movies. It’s much worse on phones.

macOS help menus are incredibly useful, system preferences is helpful, and support.apple.com actually has some useful guides. Apple also provides free training sessions at Apple Stores, and free remote support 24/7 AFAIK through AppleCare.

What do you expect? Unskippable videos when you first set up a mac followed by a mandatory test that you have to pass before you can use the computer?

Mac OS Help menu search is spectacular for discoverability. Start typing what you want and it pops up the menu with an arrow and it shows you the shortcut.

Everyone else does it worse, except maybe the VSCode command palette.

This is the only thing I miss about macos. Last Mac used was snow leopard and I _still_ sometimes find myself wishing for menu search on Linux

How do you discover key combos in Linux?

You read the man page/documentation for the software you installed that they're for, or else you defined them yourself and don't need to discover them.

Apple also provides ample documentation

Sure, but the complaint was discoverability, my point is that on Linux you start with something you don't need to discover: you either defined the shortcut yourself, or you installed something that defines it by default. There are no 'system shortcuts'.

Generally speaking, you dont actually need them in Linux, you can do everything with mouse.. however you can't actually use macOS without them.

One way to do discoverability here is to make a suggestion if you notice the user hoping around between texts during typing.

Absolutely not. Machines and software that interrupt users are Kafkaesque torture devices. Hell is full of Clippies and microwaves that repeatedly beep for eternity.

There's got to be a tactful way to do this without interrupting users. If anyone's got some good examples I'd like to take a look.

The thing some email clients do where they say “did you mean to attach something” is the one I love.

I’d like a Mark II version which also says “there is no such thing as Sunday 8th of August this year” so that I can fix my errors before they cause problems.

It's just fundamentally a bad idea. Software should never, ever bother the user during use about how it's being used. That's what tutorials and documentation are for.

No matter how clever and subtle you think you're being, you're still just redirecting the user's attention from the task at hand toward the UI itself. No matter how ignorable, dismissable, or optional it is, it's an abysmal UI failure and it shouldn't even happen once. Make the feature right in the first place and you won't have to resort to nagging.

I wouldn't mind having a shortcut or "I'm stuck" button that would try to figure out what my issue was based on my last 5 minutes of activity.

>if there was a tutorial app I would have used it..

Isn't that the Tips App? I'm pretty sure it gets recommended every time you set up a new phone. Mine has a tip on using Haptic Touch with the keyboard to move the insertion point.

I just looked at that for the first time, there's some neat stuff. Didn't know you can define actions for tapping on the back of the phone, even works with my case.

> If there was a tutorial app I would have used it

There is/was - it's called Tips, and most people ignore or uninstall it.

Its an interesting refutation and confirmation of my point.

Not only is there a tutorial app ("Tips") but you receive a notification pointing you towards it shortly after setting up a new iOS device. Also after major iOS updates. So... Yeah I suppose you're making their point for them, to an extent.

Does this apply to iPads? I had mine set up by my employer and don't think I've seen a prompt. I also don't recall seeing this on an iPhone SE I had, so maybe discover ability would be better than popups for a tips app.

I read they removed it because it required space-consuming hardware to accomplish, and Haptic Touch approximates most of its features (most) with just software.

In addition to what you mentioned they were unable to bring it to the iPad.

These features really need games added, where the only real requirement to play is learn the new feature.

Some say it's why minesweeper et al were added to Windows, so people could learn how to use the mouse.

That game really does build up mouse skills. I remember playing it when I was 5 and having no idea what the rules were - I just liked to click all the fun little boxes with the cool numbers and bombs.

Way back in the day, Apple shipped several different "Mouse Practice" tutorials on their computers to teach new users how to use the mouse. Here's videos of two of them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvcwFYPiKKA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV-d5F-AdX8

That's a great idea. Steam deck comes with a short game - Aperture desk job - that tests all of the controls. I didn't know it had a gyro until I played that game.

I’ve never met anyone who was aware of the feature. Its removal kept me from upgrading my 6S until just this year.

>Human Machine Interface hall of fame along with the old click wheel iPod Classic

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

"just few hundred clicks away"

I believe it was removed in big part due to being a relatively big energy drain. With that in mind, I don’t believe it was a bad decision, even though I liked the feature as well. (Though probably with additional R&D on the topic, it could have been improved)

And, IIRC, 3D Touch was also technologically infeasible to implement on iPad. That sharply limited what they could do with it, since it would never be available on all iOS devices.

Features like that not only add cost, but also take away from available volume for other features

I’m curious to hear what else lives in that collection

I suppose it’s indicative of why the feature was removed, that I wasn’t aware of most of the features mentioned in the article

3D touch failed because it wasn't on all iOS devices.

The end. (I didn't even know about it until I finally switched to an iPhone Xs after years and years of lowest tear iPhones).

I was wondering how and why text selection seemed to have gotten much worse. Now I know

I didn't even realize this is why the feature didn't work anymore. I thought I was doing something wrong. It's terrible. I find text selection and cursor placement on the iPhone to be infuriatingly difficult. The trackpad feature made it sooo easy. It was world class. Now it is just... gone? With no alternative?

You just have to hold down on the spacebar and the trackpad will show up.

Still a far inferior replacement, and text selection still blows.

Wow, thanks! Not as good as it was, but not bad.

Force touch and 3D touch are the same feature - they just called it 3D because “forced touching” had a bad sound to it.

Currently it’s “long press”. I think they did this so they could remove the physical layer required for 3D Touch that took up space.

The UX was better for the force sensor though, it was instant feedback based on user action and didn’t require a delay to detect.

As long as you want to select entire words, just double tap and drag -- same as desktop to do word-based selection. And even if you don't want to do word-based selection, double tap is a good way to start selection and have the selection carets close to where you want them that you can easily manually adjust.

OMG, this is a game-changer. It makes selection so much easier then trying to position long-touch.

Interesting how this comment simply summarizes the post, adding no extra information.

There's probably a way to make a lot of HN points just running a summarization model and posting the result as comment

You could probably run something over the output summary to make it sound like commentary. A filter to make the comment seem "unsure" about the conclusions of the article, or one to make it express gratitude that the article was written.

> Force Touch

Force Touch was the same tech as 3D Touch, first introduced on the watch. It was rebranded for the iPhone when the pressure sensitivity stuff was added.

It's current replacement is Haptic Touch.

> Force Touch was the same tech as 3D Touch…

"Both 3D Touch and Haptic Touch fall under the umbrella of Force Touch functionality. This is Apple's general name for its technology that lets input devices distinguish between different levels of pressure when you touch them."

https://www.makeuseof.com/apple-force-touch-3d-touch-haptic-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch

So, 3D Touch was one implementation of Force Touch.

> it's an absolute mess to use

No kidding I just managed to make it bug out and crash safari

Neat, knew about the 3d caret placement for years but not the selection part. It doesn't seem to be incredible precision however, on mine you can only add one word at a time to the end of the selection.

Better than I knew before, but not incredible. Would at least require letter by letter precision for that.

That feature is probably part of how I started having random bits of text just get deleted and typing start in the middle of a block of text.

That behavior was very, very frustrating.

> 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

Now how as a "user of apple products for 8 years" was I supposed to guess this ? Thank you ! You made my day !

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.

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.

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.

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.

I disagree. In my experience you just develop different muscle memories for different languages after enough time. The Zhuyin keyboard for Chinese has four rows and even smaller keys but basically works fine once you have some practice with it.

I disable autocorrect now. The occasional typos are more clear compared to replacing a word entirely for a wrong one.

Totally agree with the keyboard and predictive typing being a huge problem child that needs serious attention at this point. Some frustrations I have been dealing with:

- The two word replacement pattern is immensely frustrating and leads to typos, e.g., where “AI” seems to think it knows better what I was trying to write and changes the previous correct word based on what it thinks I am trying to currently type/swipe. A good example just happened below; I tried typing “mid word” below, once I started swipe typing “word” iOS thought it would be a great idea to change “mid” to make it “miss words”. Thanks for the unhelp Apple.

- The random capitalizations for no apparent reason, sometimes even mid word, and no, not from accidentally hitting shift, even during swipe typing.

- The infuriating overbearing and downright evil efforts at speech and thought control. For example you can’t swipe type certain things Apple has clearly designated as wrongthink; assuming of course that the only possible reason someone would want to use the sequence of words Apple has designated as wrongthink is for purposes that violate their perspective of narrow utopian authoritarian society.

- That for some reason sooner rather specific acronyms seem to be prioritized over the most common words in the English language through inaccuracy. One example; try swipe typing “is” with some inaccuracy and you get “OSS” instead, ab rather obscure acronym to replace “is”, or OSS it?

- The concatenation of “a” (I think there are others I can’t recall) rather than automatically adding a space when there is a hyper (I think that’s what it’s going on), so e.g., “it’s a” turns into “it’sa” … “he’s a” “what’sa”

- I too have gotten the sense some of it may even have to do with or is exacerbated by using multiple keyboard languages. I love when the autocorrect “AI” substitutes words from a different language altogether, that’sa (that was organic, but left for sarcastic effect) really great feature! (Yes, that’s more sarcasm)

> The random capitalizations for no apparent reason, sometimes even mid word, and no, not from accidentally hitting shift, even during swipe typing.

I've never had capitalization for no apparent reason (maybe I didn't pay enough attention), but I have a similar pet peeve, where the AI learns "a bit too much".

I write a lot of French, and a fairly common phrase I type is "c'est chiant" (that sucks). At first, it would try to autocorrect this to something else, probably because it's "not nice" to write that.

But after insisting on writing that for a while, it must have figured "ok, let him write that". Except that it learned the whole phrase, capitalized, because it's usually the first thing I type, so it automatically capitalizes the first letter (I always rely on automatic capitalization when writing informally).

But now when I want to write that in the middle of a sentence, it will auto-capitalize the C.

Autocorrect has a way of avoiding spicy language and replacing it with something unrelated. Me, I'm tired of this ducking shot.

As I recall, there's a workaround somewhere for that. I too find it irritating that my phone manufacturer would decide they need to censor my language. If I want to use the F word, that's my business. Autocorrect used to just be mildly annoying and humorous. In the last few years it has evolved to infuriating. And it can be so persistent, too. Used to be just back up and retype and it would leave you alone, but much of the time now it just keeps on trying to 'correct' what I'm typing.

Is there a way to change it so autocorrections are shown as suggestions rather than done automatically? I haven't used iOS in a few years, but I recall being frustrated with the default autocorrect implementation.

On other devices/keyboards (SwiftKey for example) I type a word and if it thinks I might mean something else, it shows up in a row of 3 suggestions above the keyboard. If it's correct, I tap the suggestion and it replaces whatever I'd actually typed.

Makes for easy fixes and only adds an extra "tap" if I see a mistake that needs to be corrected. Either way, beats backing up and retyping or jumping through hoops to remove "ducking" from the dictionary.

Another one - you can't use the swipe keyboard to type phrases apple thinks are "naughty", such as "white woman" or "kill myself". iOS will always change one of the two words, e.g. changing "white" to "while" or "kill" to "hill".

It's really fascinating -- on my phone (iOS 15.5), "white people" was correct to "white purple," "black people" was corrected to "blank people" (wtf Apple???), but "Asian people" went through just fine. I wonder if it has to do with something like specific ethnicity vs. broad categorisations used for bigotry. Dunno.

Words starting with a capital are treated as names and not spellchecked by most systems.

> The two word replacement pattern is immensely frustrating and leads to typos, e.g., where “AI” seems to think it knows better what I was trying to write and changes the previous correct word based on what it thinks I am trying to currently type/swipe. A good example just happened below; I tried typing “mid word” below, once I started swipe typing “word” iOS thought it would be a great idea to change “mid” to make it “miss words”. Thanks for the unhelp Apple.

SwiftKey on Android (Microsoft) does the same thing to me on occasion. It is indeed very annoying.

For your autocorrect issue with other languages: in addition to having the keyboards activated, do you also have the languages activated in Settings / General / Language & Region? I had to have both the keyboard enabled and the language in here to stop the default-language only autocorrects.

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..

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.

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.

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.

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?

This is interesting, it was always intuitive for me, like most VR controls. It's interesting to hear that it wasn't intuitive for others.

I'd been using iPhones without that feature since 2008, and there was really no reason for me to assume there was a fundamental change. Everything else was basically the same until I tried to delete some apps.

I suppose if my first iPhone was one that had this functionality, maybe I would have figured it out.

I’ve been using iPhone 6S since it was the flagship and I still don’t know any 3D Touch operations or shortcuts. I actually had to look up just now to double-check that this phone even has it and it isn’t disabled. I’m sure I could find a cheat sheet if I cared but generally I think of “intuitive” as being something you’d discover naturally at least once in nearly 7 years of daily use.

You never needed to Force Touch an icon to delete. It has been long press since the first iPhone.

But your confusion is an example of the main problem. It’s hard to discover and easily confused with long press (if you try to Force Touch and don’t apply enough pressure eventually you’re going to leave your finger there long enough to activate long press)

Or they never got a long push because they pressed slightly too hard.

Happened to me.

Oh jeez... that's gotta be exactly what happened to me, and why turning off the 3d touch setting fixed it.

I had the very first iphone and several after that before the touch thing... Long press was always the way to do that, and I never had a problem deleting hundreds of apps - I'd even released a few of my own iphone apps at that point.

Then I couldn't delete apps at all, but turning off 3d touch fixed it. Perhaps a coincidence, or some other bug. Terrible UX though.

I kinda agree, but also... NOTHING about modern phones is "intuitive". Every time I have to introduce a modern phone to a 70yo+ family member, I come to that realization promptly.

Swipe from bottom to switch programs? Swipe from top left and top right to get different (IMPORTANT!) panels? Why are three lines a "Menu"? But sometimes it's dots, or a gear icon, and they're never in the same place. On iPhone, there's no real unified "Back" button - chase it down from application to application with different context and result every time. On Android, unified buttons (including reliable and predictable "back") exist but their location and icons are not intuitive either.

I also encountered opposite problem than described - when I tell people to hold-press, they exert force. It's a natural, intuitive thing for most of them - they're trying to press hard. But the mere notion you need to hold-press anything? Completely unintuitive. Like everything else on a modern phone :-/

"Intuitive" usually just means "what I'm used to and I can't remember when it was confusing anymore."

I bought the iPhone SE partly because I find the swipes from the bottom confusing to use too.

> Swipe from bottom to switch programs? Swipe from top left and top right to get different (IMPORTANT!) panels? Why are three lines a "Menu"? But sometimes it's dots, or a gear icon, and they're never in the same place. On iPhone, there's no real unified "Back" button - chase it down from application to application with different context and result every time. On Android, unified buttons (including reliable and predictable "back") exist but their location and icons are not intuitive either.

The single, physical home button was fucking genius and iOS6 and earlier were the only operating systems I've ever seen that my very-old-and-with-significant-mental-decline grandmother might have been able to use regularly without a ton of help.

Then iOS7 came out, and later they got rid of the home button. So much for that.

> On Android, unified buttons (including reliable and predictable "back")

If the back button's reliable, that's a recent development. It spent at least a decade being the "YOLO" button that might do any damn thing. Absolutely terrible, and complete usability poison for non-nerd users. Or maybe this was sarcasm and I'm missing it.

FWIW, the iPhone SE still has the home button - https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/

Although, they've overloaded it's use - single press for home, double press for app switcher, fingerprint sensor, etc. (Or maybe that's what you were referring to with iOS 6/7?)

Agree with you in general, though: the single, physical home button that always did what you expected was great.

Android's back button usually takes you back to wherever you were before, although apps can break this (instagram, for example: if you open a message from a notification, you have to press back 3-4 times to get out of the damn app.)

The need to press back multiple times to get back to where you were before entering an app seems to be becoming the norm in many apps of late. I'm pretty sure it is yet another 'engagement trap': the app makers don't want you to leave so they can show you more ads, collect more data about you to sell on, etcetera.

Yeah, I usually uninstall that shit. I keep Instagram around specifically because my wife likes to send me things and is disappointed if I don't notice them. But I ignore basically everything else in the app aside from what my wife sends me.

Hmm

That seems a valid and desired behaviour.

If I want to exit app, I press home button.

But if I want to go back one step... I press back button. It takes me back one step. It's like the Go-mode of undo :-). Previous page or form in a browser, back several layers of menu in app or game. I may be writing an email then press back to go back to main mail screen. Etc

Basically for me, Android back button does exactly what I want it to do, in OS, games, programs and Web, zero sarcasm. And home button to "take me to where I was before I entered the app".

The back and share pipeline of Android are like it's super powers as far as I'm concerned (and I say this as somebody forced to use iPhone for work last 4 years, so get to experience both daily)

Ah, I see now that I didn't make myself clear in my previous comment. I am not criticizing the back button functionality per se, but rather the way that many apps have things set up so that it requires more, sometimes a lot more, presses of the back button to back out than it took actions (taps, swipes, whatever) to get somewhere. While this may perhaps be useful in some cases, in my opinion it is often done in a classic 'nagware' fashion, to make it more difficult to leave the app.

When I press the home button, this often doesn't close down the foreground app entirely, so after a while of doing this I will end up with lots of apps running in the background, which I don't like because often they keep consuming power even when backgrounded and may also continue gathering data about me that way.

I am aware that apps can also install and run background services separately from the app, but in my experience, the apps that I use tend to also shut down these services, as long as I exit the app entirely, using the back button.

Basically couldn’t disagree more. The swipe up makes it faster to switch between programs and saves space for the screen. I guess I just don’t have much sympathy for old people. Everyone in family, including the 90 year olds figure out the new gestures easily enough.

My first encounter with a computer was somewhat unsuccessful until I was introduced to the concept of the double-click. You mean I have to click icons twice- and not too slowly- to make them do anything useful?

Trying to teach people how to double click, fast enough, and without moving the mouse was not easy back in the day. What I had already done millions of times without thinking was and extremely difficult task for some people.

There are times I want to set the 250k+ per year developers, and the board room committees arguing if 30 or 40 ms is the appropriate touch time down with one of these users and see if they can succeed in teaching them the interface.

IOS’s swipe from the bottom (and left-right for basically alt-tab) is genius in my opinion. Not sure how true is it, but the designers of the then new iphone caught themselves multiple times trying to swipe gesture on their older, home-buttoned devices.

While I don’t believe a sufficiently complex UX could be totally intuitive (it can at most depend on existing knowledge of similar devices), it does extend the app as a physical rectangle idea very well, the animation strengthens the memory, and the movement becomes second-nature in no time.

(Also, credit where it’s due, I believe this feature was first introduced by Palm?)

Was definitely a feature on Blackberry's BB10 OS

That's basically me using my husband's iPad or iPhone. So many different gestures, it's so confusing.

I'm not sure there is such a thing as an 'intuitive' interface beyond those where the physical action of the control is visible and obvious (turning the wheel rotates the gear that raises the gate type interface)

I think just about everything else requires context, which is just a fancy way of saying that someone taught them how it worked at some point or they played with it long enough to guess their way to enough breadcrumbs that they built up that context themselves.

Yes, but you can reduce the number of gestures required to use an interface. It wasn't that long ago when the only required gesture was tap, and it was quite easy for novices to figure it all out from there.

But then they added long press, so now one icon does two or more things depending on how long your finger is touching it.

Then they decided some things don't do anything at all if you tap them, only if you long press them.

Then they decided it should matter how hard you long press.

Then they decided you should memorize which quadrant of the screen you need to swipe to do something.

"intuitive" is a spectrum, and we are steadily moving to the less intuitive side. I think just giving users a bash prompt and a cheat sheet might be more intuitive at this point.

Intuitive might not be the perfect term; clear, unambiguous, predictable behavior might describe it better. There was a lot of research into such interfaces and improving functionality decades ago. But when users stopped being the customers it was quickly discarded.

Newer versions of android default to the gesture based app switching, back button, and home, but I dislike it.

Thankfully I'm able to change settings to bring back the dedicated bottom navigation "buttons" (they are virtual, on screen)

Not perfect but I'm glad that it's an option

I think we definitely transitioned into frog boiling a long time ago, but that has played out in other industries too. You just only get to see it first hand when you're working with an absolute beginner.

There are so many more buttons in cars now than when I first started driving. I've mostly adapted to them, except when I have to drive a friends car and everything is in the wrong fucking place. WE DO NOT NEED TO MOVE CRUISE CONTROL THANK YOU. And don't get me started about breaking the gear shift lever. There are hidden features in the old design that apparently the new designers didn't know about, but anyone who drives for a living or just cosplays at being an advanced driver knows about slapping an automatic transmission from reverse into drive...

Anyway, point is that I don't envy children trying to figure out all of the stalks and buttons on a modern car, and then immediately trying to figure out how to merge into highway traffic. It's no wonder everyone is waiting until they're older to drive. Smartphones feel categorically similar in their evolution.

Thank you, I didn't know about "swipe from top left" until I read your comment. I've been using an employer-provided iPhone for about a year and never knew about this.

I remember when they shipped me a mac book pro for work, I literally was unable to click on stuff, I had to ask in a discord server for help until someone mentioned pushing, turns out you don't tap to click, you push, which was so weird at first.

Eventually however, the track pad was the one thing I really enjoyed about using an apple product.

You can absolutely tap to click on a Mac trackpad. I don't know what the default is, but this behavior is configurable in system preferences.

Yep, I also never loved it. I didn't find it to be very precise, and it took so long to kick in that the replacement system (long touch) is just about as fast for me.

I did sort of like the press slightly to move the text carat, but my biggest complaint is the level of pressure needed to activate never felt really consistent to me - there is a sort of range of pressures it worked across, I could never get reliable muscle memory for activating it with 100% success rate. I think people arguing this was intuitive are extremely misguided; it has almost zero discoverability unless you read about it or are shown.

I always assumed the bigger issue is that because this is strain based, extrapolating the feature to an iPad sized screen was possibly too challenging without resorting to something like an array of strain gauges to measure across the display. IIRC, no iPad ever got this feature. Given how it worked on an iPhone sized display, I can imagine challenge increases with screen size of measuring this accurately.

One also has to imagine that when Apple reviewed their usage metrics, was this feature even worth the cost to ship?

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.

3D touch added 14g (+10.8%) and 2mm (+3%) to the iPhone 6s vs the 6.

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!

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.

That sounds pretty fast, my 12 Pro Max is roughly the same age and at 96%

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.

> What's usually missing from these comparisons is how long people are actually using the phone and how they handle the battery

According to my phone, over the last 10 days I had an average screen time of 3h34m per day. I use it to communicate and to consume media while commuting. I charge it whenever it needs some juice, it does get to down to 10%-20% sometimes.

But honestly I don't see how my usage can hurt it so much. And if my usage is indeed what damages the battery so much, then that seems to be Apples issue, considering how I'm really not a poweruser or whatever.

What battery health does your phone have? I can't imagine that having a phone connected to a power source 95% of its lifetime can be especially good for the battery.

Letting it go down to 20% before charging it back up means the battery has to cycle, and as I understand, that's what "ages" it. And managing that is on you, it's not Apple's fault that you won't (or can't) plug it in.

What can be Apple's fault is the battery going to 10% after using it for 3h, but I don't think that's the point here.

I'm sorry, but how can it be my fault for using a device until it's battery is low-ish?

> Letting it go down to 20% before charging it back up means the battery has to cycle

Apple actually says themselves, that "You complete one charge cycle when you’ve used (discharged) an amount that equals 100% of your battery’s capacity — but not necessarily all from one charge." [1]

The iPhone 12 mini has a 2,227mAh battery. Its battery health is at 86%, so effectively I have 1915mAh. But now you're also telling me that I can't use it past 20%, which leaves me with 1530mAh, or 68% of the original capacity.

I can totally agree that with long-term usage it's up to the user to optimize their battery usage for health. But my device was at 92% battery health after not even a full year and I simply won't accept that this is on me. Especially if we consider how expensive and complicated Apple makes it to replace a battery. Apple also tells me that I can charge my battery whenever I want.

To give more insight, GPS is fully disabled 99% of the time, it runs in dark mode, auto-brightness is disabled and I usually set it to a pretty low brightness, 5G is disabled and generally I remember disabling lots of things like "double tap to wake screen", "lift phone to wake screen" etc.

[1] https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium-ion/

That's not at all my point.

Whatever time it spends unplugged, is time spent draining the battery. Down to 90% or down to 0%, it's just a difference of amount.

If you keep it plugged most of the time, and only drain it to, say, 90% (and this is an arbitrary number), you only used 10% of one cycle. If you let it unplugged until it's down to 0%, you use 100% of one cycle.

If every day you let it go down to 0% and then charge it back up, in 10 days you've used 10 cycles.

If every day it only loses 10% (total) and charge it back up, in 10 days, you've used 1 cycle.

I'm not saying "it's your fault" or that "you shouldn't do it", I'm talking about objective use of the battery.

Yeah, I know it's a mobile phone, so one of the reasons for buying that is to use while out and about.

But the point is that not everyone uses it that way, which can explain why some people see the battery health going down faster than others, on the same device.

And that's not Apple's fault. Sure, you could argue that the battery life is ridiculously short, that the battery's health shouldn't degrade as fast, and so on. And I'd agree with that. But still, it's a different issue.

I both agree and disagree with the first part of your comment, but you summarized my thoughts on your own with "it's a mobile phone, so one of the reasons for buying that is to use while out and about".

> not everyone uses it that way, which can explain why some people see the battery health going down faster than others

True, yes. However, and feel free to disagree, but from my experience the minority of people keep their phones plugged in as much as they can, at least in my social circle and work environment.

I knew that I would have to live with shorter battery life when buying a small phone with a small battery and I also know that batteries just loose health and that this is normal. The drop on my device just makes me think that maybe my device has some kind of issue, or received a battery which would be placed on the left side of a bell curve.

Wanted to check the exact stats - So, I bought it in the end of April 2021. That's 16 months ago. If a 14% loss of battery health during that time is normal, then maybe I had wrong expectations. It just seems excessive when comparing with other people/devices.

I understand your questioning, and I think it's fair to want to know that. But my whole point was that care should be taken when making comparisons, because the actual use of different people can have an effect on the metric of battery health.

I'd agree with your point that people keeping the phone plugged in all the time are a minority. But even so, I wonder if screen time is enough of a metric to gauge "similar use patterns".

For example, my phone absolutely drains the battery when using Google Maps, whereas browsing HN on a basic text-only app doesn't seem to make a dent.

Being constantly charging is actually bad for the battery life. Being around 100% stresses it… so that’s why some Apple devices now try to determine how much charge is needed and keep it at 80% if possible

It does. But does it stress it more than charging to 100% then draining it to, say, 10%, then charging it again? Hence, racking up cycles at a faster rate?

I know it's anecdotal, but I mostly keep my battery-powered electronics plugged-in when possible, and their batteries tend to degrade much less over the years compared to a friend's, who tends to unplug them and charge them when needed. And the electronics in question are fairly similar: iPhones and same-gen Macbooks.

Same for my work laptop (hp) which, after 4 years, still has around 80% of its original battery life, when my colleagues', who use them much more often on battery, only last around 50% of their new condition, if they weren't changed because of swelling.

The one kind of battery among mine that seem to have shorter lives are camera batteries. Which, of course, tend to get drained more since I don't have an outlet handy when out in the woods.

1.5 years old 12 Pro, 83% battery health.

But I mostly do iOS software engineering, so the device spends most of it’s time plugged in.

In a few months, it won’t even need to try to stay under 80% anymore. It just will.

I bought my 12 Mini at launch and it's at 84% capacity. If I'm remembering correctly, it was at around 86% at the start of this year.

There were some battery drain issues in different versions of iOS 14 and I believe there was some unnecessary wear in there, as well as a couple 'recalibrations' of battery health in iOS. Maybe the phone was falsely reporting 100% at release and was corrected to a lower percentage.

I'd be curious to see if anyone with a fall 2020 still has over 90% battery health.

Just adding my +1 to this issue. iPhone 12 mini at 83% health is really low after such a short period of time.

I wonder if reliability was a factor in ending this feature.

I think the issue is more that it was not very discoverable. A bet the vast majority of non-tech users didn't even know it existed and perhaps accidentally activated 3D touch much to their confusion.

Removing it simplifies the hardware, avoids accidental activations and is less maintenance work.

I still miss 3D Touch :(. I am happy that Macs still have Force Touch, even though Force Touch and haptic feedback are criminally underused. There are so many useful applications, e.g. OmniGraffle gives subtle haptic feedback when dragging an object and it aligns with another object. It's such a nice feature that other apps could learn from.

I’m a tech user and barely knew this feature existed. I noticed it wasn’t there yesterday because I didn’t accidentally engage it like I normally do.

It’s tough to sell a feature that has no interface. A little too minority report arm flailing for me :)

> The 6s case was bent for every person who carried it in their back pocket

Baloney - it was the 6 Plus, not the 6S, and it was far more rare than twitter would have had you believe.

You're probably thinking of the bend gate controversy, where the bend in the case in the plus model was severe enough to damage the logic board. That, also, was not rare. We saw it constantly in the shop. Nearly every iphone 6, 6s or 6p that entered the shop had a bent case to some degree.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

When I'm telling Siri to play something, I need to manually open the app every time and push this little button. Like multiple times a day I need to set the "Tim Cook, don't fucking change my music on me" button which I did not had to formerly do.

For me, that's poor UX and fucked up good product (iTunes.app).

> 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.

There’s a “infinity” toggle on the song list, which if you turn off stops that behaviour

It's so much worse on macOS Music. The "previous track" button is disabled in "infinity play mode". Not just for going to the previous track but even for replaying the current track. When it's not disabled, its behavior seems to depend on how you started playing the music - sometimes skipping back multiple tracks in an album instead of one at a time. Finally, the "infinite play" toggle is only visible if you play an album or playlist because otherwise the "up next" menu is hidden. Oh yeah, and the whole thing crashes every time I try to search my library - I suspect because of foreign language UTF8 characters in some track titles.

The whole app seems to have been designed by a madman. I miss the bloated, yet functional, iTunes.

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.

It’s definitely a solvable problem.

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.

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.

> 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?

Yes, it works in all iPhones with or without 3D Touch.

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.

Kinda like lack of a real Delete key on Apple laptops. Point that out, and iPologist dweebs always jump in with "Nyeahh, Command-delete!"

NO. Not only is this ridiculously cumbersome, but it's not marked on the keyboard. So 99+ % of Apple users undertake DOUBLE the keystrokes to arrow the cursor past the letters they want to delete and then use Apple's mislabeled Backspace key to get rid of them. I've been in the Apple store and heard a customer come in and ask if there's some way to configure the keyboard to have a legitimate Delete key.

Meanwhile everyone else manages to provide a real Delete key, even on SMALL laptops.

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.

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

> 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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

Ahh, thanks. Selecting that way is so janky for me that I wonder if it's not actually a bug. I tried a number of times and it behaves really weirdly / unpredictably.

Seconded. I don't understand what they meant by two hands/fingers.

When you have activated the cursor move function by long-pressing the space bar, while still pressing the screen, tap another finger on the screen to move into selection mode.

The prior mention of defining the start and end points of the selection is a bit more tricky and may not even be an actual feature, which involves moving the cursor around in a kind of handoff between start and stop point. That’s trickier to describe because it fellas like it may just be a quirky behavior that can be manipulated.

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.

Why do they refuse to give you a manual? Why are there no instructions. Drives me crazy.

> 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.

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.

There is a large user manual available in “Books” ; https://books.apple.com/gb/book/iphone-user-guide/id15159955...

I imagine most iPhone users don’t know it is there!

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.

They literally do not. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/welcome/ios

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

I use an iPhone XS too. I love this feature & did not know it was 3D touch-specific.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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

[2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-discontinues-3d-touch-...

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.

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.

Accessibility is never a priority in the software world.

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.

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.

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

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...

I didn't know about any of those but they all sound a lot better than shake which never works for me. TY!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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,

> 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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Works for me on the second tap.

If I tap twice it selects the whole word. Leaving more time between taps has the same result as one tap. iOS 15.1.

Don’t double tap. Tap once, wait a sec, tap again in center of word.

Doesn't work, maybe it's model-specific. I'm on a first gen iPhone SE.

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.

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.

Just checked a short video of Word Flow. Isn't it the same as Gboard or Microsoft Swiftkey?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Neither device has 3D touch anymore

The iPad never had 3D Touch.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

I had no idea this spacebar to trackpad feature existed! It is awesome!

Someone showed me this a couple years ago and my mind was blown!

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

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!

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.

> 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!

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

> 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".

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.)

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

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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

> 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

[1]: https://youtu.be/XlcCgiYF2Fs?t=26

It’s not force touch, it’s long touch now.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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)

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.

but what you are describing here exists on newer models as well, sans force touch.. long press.

On my xs when i think i long press i can get Two different results… and they seem random to me.

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.

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.

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!

If you use anything from Apple you're living in a golden cage after all.

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. )

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I also miss 3D Touch

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?

follow up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32354824

so actually it works on long press right now.

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.

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.

I miss the squeeze feature on my old Pixel 2 - I used it all the time and it was awesome. Shame they removed it

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?

You could squeeze the bottom half of the phone to trigger the Google Assistant, can't remember if it was remappable or not.

Totally agree with the author, I loved this feature and copying parts of text/URLs is more difficult now.

I miss 3D Touch. It cut 300ms from many UI actions making you feel like a power user.

Spacebar cursor selection is INCREDIBLY glitchy and frustrating and I use it daily...

Why do I feel like Apple's threshold for removing features is really low?

I have an extremely outdated version of iOS and I still have this feature lol

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.

3D Touch was supreme. I especially miss the keyboard thing and peek-and-pop.

Genuine TIL: long press spacebar in iOS for precise text selection

Well what do you know...

Woah, that is cool, I had no idea. I will definitely be using this.

Long live 3D Touch. I miss my XS Max only because of that.

"Why do users disable automatic updates?"

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...

> 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

[1]: https://youtu.be/XlcCgiYF2Fs?t=26

TL;DR: his favourite feature (hard click on keyboard to move cursor) was not removed (just relegated to "hard click on spacebar")

I was happy that they removed 3D Touch because some stuff was simply inaccessible to iPhone SE users.

Oh poor man. You have to go "all the way" to the spacebar to do it now? So sad.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There’s two ways the camera can open from the Lock Screen, pressing the on screen button, or by swiping from the right of the screen.

Only 1% of computer users do programming. Command lines, compilers, and any method of editing code should be ruthlessly killed off otherwise we risk having a collection of features.

Just give me a phone with a bunch of pictures and mandatory like buttons. That’s 90% of computing’s use case and all we need.

You're being satirical, but doing just this has helped make the smartphone a huge success. You still have your computer to write code, nobody is taking it away from you. There are even numerous coding apps for smartphones, to cater to the 1%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

Which bucket does that 1% fall into though? It’s not as simple as saying only a few people use it, trash it.

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.

No but that's a good one as well! It was 3D Touch, where the screen actually had pressure sensitivity built into it.

Tape your dongle to your headphone cable?

What if you use multiple devices, e.g. a laptop too?

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/never-lose-your-ipho...

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.

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.

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.

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