When Apple launched the iPhone
6s/Plus, 3D
Touch was one of the headline features. Apple
devoted a full four-minute video to showing what it does
and how it works. Even today, visit the Apple website and
click on the iPhone
6s, and it’s the first thing you see. Apple’s
summary of the phone is ‘3D Touch, 12MP photos, 4K video.’
The first tab at the top of the screen is 3D Touch. The
first video linked is the one for 3D Touch. Scroll down
the page for the detail of the phone, and 3D Touch – ‘the
next generation of multi-touch’ – is again the first
feature to be shown. Clearly Apple thinks it’s a big deal.
And yet, the company just this week unveiled not just one
but two new iOS devices, neither of which offers the
feature. This is perhaps understandable in the case of the
iPhone
SE – Apple needed some tech distinctions between its
flagship phone and its new budget model. But it’s an odd
omission from a brand
new iPad …
I’ve heard two theories about why Apple hasn’t rolled out
3D Touch more widely. The first is that yield rates have
been poor. That would limit the volumes in which the
system can be produced, and make it an expensive feature
to add. If that is indeed the case, it adds a second
reason for Apple to withhold it from its cheapest ever
iPhone.
The second is that there are significant challenges
involved in scaling-up 3D Touch to larger screens, and
that this is the reason we haven’t yet seen it on an iPad.
While both suggestions are unconfirmed, I think they are
likely true – because otherwise, Apple’s behavior doesn’t
make sense. There’s no other reason I can see to hold back
from the latest iPad a feature the company champions so
strongly.
But even if it’s manufacturing challenges holding back
the wider rollout, it still effectively places the feature
on hold for a large chunk of iOS users.
![apps]( "Opinion: Will limited
device & app support lead 3D Touch to wither and
die?")
Nor is hardware support the only issue. While we have
seen an increasing number of apps adding support for 3D
Touch, it has still been adopted by only a minority of
them. I haven’t seen any hard numbers, but if you follow
the ‘View 3D Touch apps in the App Store‘
link on Apple’s website, it shows only 56.
Clearly there are many more than that, but a random
sampling of the third-party apps on the first two screens
on my iPhone shows that just 9 out of 37 of them support
3D Touch. Whatever the overall percentage, it’s low.
If adding 3D Touch support to an app was a complex task,
you could understand developers deciding not to bother
until Apple makes it available on more devices. But it’s
not: adding Home screen actions is extremely easy. For
whatever reason, developers don’t appear to share Apple’s
view of the importance of the feature.
And it’s not just third-party developers who haven’t
fully embraced the feature: there are still native Apple
apps that don’t. The Activity app, for one. That’s a
pretty crazy state of affairs.
![finger]( "Opinion: Will limited
device & app support lead 3D Touch to wither and
die?")
My sampling of my own apps brings up another big problem
with 3D Touch. The only way I could tell which ones
support it was to force-touch each one in turn.
Trial-and-error. There’s no other way to tell.
As Forbes contributor Gordon
Kelly put it in a Facebook discussion we were having
yesterday: “For the record, I like 3D Touch, but it needs
to be implemented in a way that removes the guesswork of
what is and isn’t 3D Touch enabled.”
I’m going to be a little less polite than him. Just think
about that from a UI perspective: an app may or may not
support a headline feature of the phone, and the only way
I can tell is by randomly stabbing at apps with my
finger like a deranged monkey. That is
utterly appalling UI design, and there’s no excuse for it
from anyone – far less from Apple, which prides itself on
usability above all else.
I would argue it’s also poor UI to have an operating
system feature that may or may not be available depending
on the device you’re using at the time. Sure, I understand
that older devices may not be able to support all of the
latest features, and that there are some features only
practical on a larger screen. But someone switching
between the flagship iPhone and the very latest iPad
should not be seeing a feature on their phone that they
can’t use on their iPad.
![end]( "Opinion: Will limited
device & app support lead 3D Touch to wither and
die?")
So 3D Touch seems to be trapped in a Catch-22 situation.
App developers are seeing what looks like half-hearted
support for it from Apple, and not even bothering to do
the pretty trivial work involved in supporting Home screen
actions, while Apple can’t really make too much fuss about
a feature that some of its high-end iOS devices don’t
have at all, and others have in only a relatively small
percentage of apps.
This seems to me to call into question the future of the
feature. Even if 3D Touch makes it into iPads in the next
release, it will by then be such old news Apple can’t
really hype it to any significant degree. And there will
be a whole new generation of iPhone owners – those
attracted by the ability to buy the very latest iPhone at
a far more affordable level – who will never have
experienced it.
One final personal point. When I first experienced 3D
Touch, I was extremely impressed with it. I said at the time that I saw it as a
good reason to upgrade from the iPhone 6 to the 6s. But I
do have to say that the novelty has somewhat worn off – in
part, because of ‘stabbing monkey’ syndrome: it gets
annoying force-touching an app that does nothing, so I’ve
largely stopped bothering. My use of 3D Touch is limited
to those apps I use most frequently.
I do still think it’s a good feature. I like being able
to upload a photo to Facebook right from the Home screen.
I like the ease of being able to message a recent contact,
resume a recent podcast, instantly recall the most recent
photo I took, send a tweet or add a new note. But I’m not
sure it’s the must-have feature I thought it might be,
especially when I can’t use it on my iPad.
The real test for me will be when I try an experimental switch to the iPhone
SE. I do think 3D Touch may be the thing I miss most. But
I also suspect I’m going to be able to live without it –
and I think the way things have gone so far, I may not be
alone.
What’s your view of 3D Touch? Must-have feature,
nice-to-have or meh? Does it annoy you to have it on your
iPhone but not your iPad? Do you think it has a future?
Please take our poll and share your thoughts in the
comments.
