HOW IT WORKS
Haptic Touch: how tactile sensors work
Haptic Touch gives you tactile feedback when you long-press your screen
Remember 3D Touch, Apple’s technology for iPhone screens? It’s gone, replaced by a technology Apple calls Haptic Touch. The results feel very similar, but the two technologies are very different.
3D Touch vs Haptic Touch: what’s the difference?
Apple introduced 3D Touch in the iPhone 6S in 2015, and the technology was used across the iPhone range up to and including the iPhone X, iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. The idea behind 3D Touch was to make additional options available to you if you pressed harder on your phone’s screen.
3D Touch is a pressure-sensing technology that can tell not just where your finger is but how hard you’re pressing. It works by including a layer of sensors in the iPhone’s display that measure pressure.
That made some interesting things possible, so for example if you did a normal press on an icon it would open the app, but if you pressed down harder you might get a context-sensitive menu instead. It worked rather like a right-click on a mouse.
3D Touch also enabled more natural input, especially with a stylus that wasn’t itself pressure-sensitive.
Haptic Touch thinks different, and it’s the mobile equivalent of the Force Touch in recent Macs and Magic Trackpads. Where 3D Touch measured how hard you pressed an icon or other interface element, Haptic Touch is based on how long you press it for. It isn’t pressure sensitive at all. It’s a feedback mechanism that gives you tactile feedback when you long-press your screen.
Haptic Touch also provides physical feedback, known as force feedback. Since the iPhone 7, Apple’s phones have included a similar Taptic Engine to the motors that make vibrations in the Apple Watch. The Taptic Engine delivers much more precise and realistic feedback than the traditional ‘rumble packs’ you find in some other phones and in devices, such as games console controllers.
Why has Apple stopped using 3D Touch?
Haptic Touch doesn’t require any pressure sensors, so it’s easier and cheaper to manufacture devices that use it rather than 3D Touch: getting those pressure sensors into an elegantly curved edge-to-edge display (or whatever displays Apple has in mind for future devices) isn’t easy.
But the main reason is even simpler. Nobody was using 3D Touch.
Okay. Saying ‘nobody’ is perhaps a little unfair. But very many, and possibly even most, iPhone users who had 3D Touch either didn’t know it was there, didn’t remember to use it or just couldn’t be bothered with it. As soon as 3D Touch was dropped in the iPhone XR, 3D Touch was dead. Few developers want to use a feature that isn’t available on every iPhone.
Is it difficult to get used to the difference between the two?
With Haptic Touch it doesn’t matter how hard or how light your touch is. All that matters is time. If you’ve pressed long enough to activate Haptic Touch, you’ll feel a gentle tap below your finger. There are two sensitivity options; if you want to change it, go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Haptic Touch, then select Fast or Slow.
The only big difference we’ve found between 3D Touch and Haptic Touch is in the iPhone keyboard, where previously you could press anywhere to turn the keyboard into a cursor but now you have to long-press the Space bar, and in the Home screen, where you have to press an icon longer to make it ‘jiggle’. But Haptic Touch works pretty much anywhere 3D Touch used to unless you have the 2020 iPhone SE: unlike other current iPhones it doesn’t support Haptic Touch on lock screen notifications.
Where can you use Haptic Touch on Apple devices?
You can use Haptic Touch in lots of places on your iPhone. On the Home screen it brings up an action menu when you long-press an app icon. Naturally, that menu varies from app to app, so for example in Messages it’ll show your most recent contacts and Calendar will show you today’s events.
Haptic Touch works on some notifications too. If you long-press the little ‘X’ above your notifications, it’ll bring up the Clear All
Notifications button; if you long-press an individual notification you can ask your phone to deliver such notifications quietly or turn them off altogether.
Control Centre used 3D Touch on most of its icons and it now uses Haptic Touch instead. Long-press the Wi-Fi icon to go into Wi-Fi settings; do the same on the Flashlight icon and you can adjust its brightness; long-press on the Camera to open it in selfie, video or portrait modes. If you use the Home app, long-pressing the icon for a specific device enables you to control it, so for example if you long-press a smart bulb you can adjust its brightness or colour.
We mentioned ‘peek’ in Safari. That’s now a Haptic Touch, and it works in other apps too. For example, in Mail you can longpress a message in your inbox to access quick actions such as Reply, Move, Trash and so on; in Photos, you can peek at a Live Photo by long-pressing it.
Haptic Touch is much less confusing than the 3D Touch/long-press mess. Unlike the 3D Touch technology that preceded it, it’s a much more Apple approach – it just works.
Carrie Marshall