3D Touch and the future of iPhone

When I first saw the Apple Watch demonstrated a year ago, Force Touch caused me to remark that multitouch had just gone multidimensional.

That was followed by the Force Touch trackpad on the new MacBooks, which began to hint at the potential of multiple levels of depth and regions of a surface. Now 3D Touch on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus show what's possible when you combine the direct interaction of the former with the range of the latter. And it's remarkable.

Deep press into the lock screen and a Live Photo animates before your eyes. Deep press on an icon and options spring up. Deep press on a data detector or list item and a preview gives you a peek. Swipe up and find quick options. Swipe across in mail and find even quicker ones. Press deeper and the preview pops up and fills the screen. Deep press on a thumbnail and scroll through your photos. Deep swipe and sketched lines in notes get just a little bit thicker. Deep swipe and the Fast App Switcher unfolds...

Physically, 3D Touch has been superbly tuned, sensitivity and Taptic engine response both. It's not on a hair trigger, so one you know it's there you don't have to worry about activating it accidentally. But it's not a chore either and nothing that came close to bothering my repetitive stress injuries.

Interactively, the representation fits beautifully into the rest of the iOS 9 aesthetic and provides options that are not only easy to glance and understand, but easy to engage. It makes 3D Touch as visually satisfying as it is physically.

Press a little bit and you get a hint of what's there. Enough that, even if no options have been assigned, you know you've bumped into something and you're encouraged to keep playing and discovering. Press a little more and you get options or a peek/preview. Keep pressing and you pop open an action.

Developers have access to most of it, so it will eventually be everywhere, and that's important because convenience is at its most powerful when it's consistent.

It takes only a few minutes to start feeling natural. Then the fun begins. Apple used to solve for one-handed ease of use by constraining screens to a small size. Then, little-by-little, they began to solve for it in software. The universal back gesture in iOS 7 was the first example, enhanced by the rounded edges of the iPhone 6 a year later. 3D Touch is the next step, enabling far more to be done with a single finger than ever before.

So much so that you begin not to need the Home button.

The Home screen in iOS was never meant to be a destination but a gateway to apps. You used to need to click the Home button to go back to the Home screen to choose and launch a different app. Extensibility in iOS 8 decoupled features from apps so you could call sharing and action options and even widgets to wherever you already were. Universal links, especially the back link, in iOS 9 lets you return to the previous app without having to transit through the Home screen or even the Fast App Switcher interface. Now 3D Touch on the iPhones 6s make it so you don't even need to double-click the Home button to go to the Fast App Switcher and any recent or Continuity app.

It's enough to make you wonder about the future of the Home button in a world where the Home screen isn't important or urgent enough to need a persistent physical button—when the hardware gets its iOS 7 moment.

Right now we're in a period of transition. We have legacy devices and interactions that require a secondary tap to confirm destructive actions or a long press to bring up options. But that will change over time.

It's not hard to imagine 3D Touch allowing us to press with more commitment for actions that require more commitment. Or to press deeper for actions that are deeper. There's a change more deliberate and less urgent might clash at first, but context could decide a lot of that.

Perhaps even as emotions become more committed and deeper. (Is it too early to lobby for a Tweet/Post button that, if deep pressed, changes everything to ALL CAPS so you can POST ANGRY OR EXCITED?)

3D Touch literally feels like the next step in tactile interactivity. It really does make multitouch multidimensional. The hardware is finely tuned and the interface is consistent and incredibly well considered. It might take time for the really important options to become perfectly chosen and placed for each and every app, but even at launch it's obvious it's going to be transformative.

It's one of those things that makes an interface, especially a single-column interface like the iPhone perceptively much, much faster. And I've long felt that when it comes to mobile, convenience is always the killer app.