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Android Q gets own version of 3D Touch

Android Q gets own version of 3D Touch
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The ‘force touch’ is having a makeover…

You may remember back in 2014 when Apple announced one of its most exciting screen features on a range of its devices: 3D Touch. Known as ‘force touch’ amongst the geeks and manufacturers, this innovative tech was a game-changer for the touch screen.

Beforehand, most of our devices’ touch screens had no measurement of pressure, which allowed for a few ‘long press’ features but (as the name suggests) took some time to activate. Force touch was able to remove that problem, offering the features as soon as you press the screen a little harder.



Historically, Android handsets have only sported the ‘long press’ feature, introduced on the Android 8 Oreo OS. But we’ve heard that the latest OS update Android Q might be finding its own way to incorporate some pressure-touch tech.

The idea is that if you press harder on an Android app, it’d offer you different shortcuts to certain areas of it – the ‘Compose an email’ section of a mail app, for example.

That’s long been a feature on Apple devices (since the first ever Apple Watch was launched and on iPhone since the 6s in 2015), so we’re excited to see a more seamless approach to app shortcuts on Android going forward.

We’re not quite sure how this’ll work yet, is the only caveat. Being an OS update there wouldn’t be any hardware changes to existing Android phones, which could mean that it’ll only be a feature for new Android phones once Q is rolled out. The detail on this is still a little hazy, though, and we wouldn’t be surprised if Google found a clever workaround to put some similar tech onto our current phones. We’ve seen them surprise us before!

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