The Problem With 3D Touch

Jason Snell and the trouble with 3D Touch:

This is, I realize, [o]ne of the reasons I stopped using 3D Touch so much. It seemed like so many places I attempted to use the gesture resulted in a whole lot of nothing. After a while, I gave up. 3D Touch needs to be pervasive. It needs to be a gesture that works all over the place, so that using it becomes second nature.

I completely agree. 3D Touch has a lot of promise but so far is implemented in a half-hearted way in almost every app I’ve tried. His comments about using the long-press gesture to trigger 3D Touch on devices that don’t have hardware support for it, so that the functionality can work everywhere and thereby entice developers to implement it more widely, makes a lot of sense.

In case you were not aware of all the ways you can currently use 3D Touch, see the iMore 3D Touch Guide. One other very useful capability for those who type a lot of text is using your keyboard as a trackpad with 3D Touch. I type a lot of notes on my iPhone and had forgotten all about this (too bad – it’s a very useful feature), which brings up another problem with features like this: lack of discoverability.

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