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How to change Haptic Touch gesture duration on iPhone XR

iOS 12.1.1 added Haptic Touch support for notification previews on iPhone XR. It also added a new menu in Accessibility settings that lets you change the Haptic Touch settings …

In the Accessibility settings, iPhone XR users will find a new Haptic Touch menu when running iOS 12.1.1 or later.

As a reminder, Haptic Touch is the brand name Apple gave to its combination of long press and haptic vibration, which serves as a substitute for some 3D Touch capabilities on the iPhone XR.

This screen only contains one setting for now, Touch Duration. It lets users switch between a Fast or Slow activation speed for Haptic Touch. Fast is the default. ‘Slow’ means users must wait about twice as long to enact the gesture. Select Fast or Slow by tapping on the rows to change the checkmark.

If you find yourself activating the firm press features too easily, try changing the preference to the Slow option to make the iPhone wait longer before activating the Haptic Touch action.

Apple includes an interactive demo area for users to try out the Haptic Touch gesture on a faux recreation of the Lock screen torch shortcut button.

Haptic Touch on iPhone XR enables features like the Lock screen torch and camera action buttons, rich notification previews, keyboard trackpad mode, and activating Control Center panels.

Prior to this release, a third-party developer could perfectly copy the Haptic Touch experience in their own apps by setting up a long press gesture recognizer, that concludes with a haptic vibration. However, now that users can adjust the duration in this new Haptic Touch menu, a third-party app will not be able to stay in sync with the user’s preferences.

The supported API for 3D Touch allows apps to inherit the exact same behavior (including changes to 3D Touch Sensitivity) as Apple’s 3D Touch implementations, but an analogous system for Haptic Touch does not currently exist. We’ll be on the lookout to see if Apple adds a formal Haptic Touch developer API in the future.

Thanks Federico!


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