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Comment by failTide | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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