“Three years ago, Jason Snell wrote about the problems with 3D Touch, after six months on the market (Apple introduced it with the iPhone 6s),” Jason Cross writes for Macworld. “His conclusion: 3D touch is not ubiquitous enough to be relied upon as a key interface function for developers, and after six months he had quit using it entirely.”
“Here we are several years and several iPhones later, and the situation isn’t any better,” Cross writes. “3D Touch is still an Easter egg, a gimmick, a shortcut for enthusiasts. Precious few apps make it a core part of their interface.”
“And how could they? No iPad has ever included 3D Touch. Apple’s most popular current model iPhone, the iPhone XR, doesn’t have it,” Cross writes. “Now, new rumors state that 3D Touch will be absent from all 2019 iPhones. I say, good riddance.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s a shame.
We use 3D Touch to launch the Camera app quickly on our iPhones daily.
A huge amount of work went into 3D Touch, from hardware to software; looks like it was all for naught. 3D Touch is like AppleScript. Pro users know about it and some even use it extensively while the rest of the world has no idea it exists.
As always, the simpletons of the world are easily confused or too incurious to bother spending 15 minutes learning something that would save themselves hours over the long run.
Hopefully, Apple will bring Haptic Touch up to 3D Touch capabilities before they axe 3D Touch altogether.
Related articles:
Apple expected to eliminate 3D Touch from all 2019 iPhones in favor of Haptic Touch – May 28, 2019
Apple iPhones may get full-screen Touch ID in 2020; possible all-new iPhone SE coming, too – May 24, 2019
Come on Apple!
3D touch is used daily on my side. So much possibilities yet under develop. PM me Tim, I’ll explain a couple of possibilities to make this UI an astonishing feature and part of the iOS’s unique UX!
The ability to use 3D Touch with the iPhone keyboard to position the text cursor and make text selections is an awesome feature. It will be a shame to lose it.
The haptic feedback space bar shortcut doesn’t provide one handed text selection like 3D Touch does…
I use 3d touch daily. I turn my keyboard into a track pad , I check my messages, open my camera. Of course now there’s force touch, but I don’t like it as much
Oh please. If we’re honest, that’s the very core group of people Apple targets (used to target?) with their “it just works” approach!
Case in point: how many people on Macs bother to learn and use keyboard shortcuts, beyond cut-copy-paste? I can count on one hand the number of Mac users I know that use shortcuts to navigate Finder by keyboard, or Safari back/forward pages and next/previous tabs, or hell even command-tab to switch apps. How many hours does that save over the long run? It’s one of the simplest ways productivity can be boosted, and yet that’s considered something only “power users” do.
I use 3D touch myself, but the article laid it out plainly: Apple themselves never put it into iPads. Low-end iPhones never got it. This resulted in the same kind of feature fragmentation you eviscerate Android for.
“This resulted in the same kind of feature fragmentation you eviscerate Android for.”
I hate to say it, but this is 100% correct.
Never use it. In fact, I’ve turned it off on my iPhone X.
Same as force touch on my Macbook. Disabled, never really liked how it works.
Always use 3D touch. They should leave it for the rest of us who know how to use it.
Using 3d touch to launch the camera app is the opposite of a benefit. The camera button is on the lock screen. Touching it (without pressing extra) does… nothing. At all. ONLY by 3d-pressing do you launch the camera app.
Cursor positioning is a good feature that doesn’t need 3D Touch at all. Press-and-hold for about 1/4 second on the spacebar accomplishes the same.
In fact, long press could replace 3dTouch for just about every application it’s used for. Apps where there’s press-a-little and press-a-lot functionality have (for me) always been a mess. I don’t find the thresholds intuitive and it puts additional strain on my thumb/hands.
I won’t miss it and I imagine nobody else will either. It’s a toy without a core reason for being. Lots of those in iOS lately and I’d be happy to see them all go. Every feature should really have a purpose.