How to use 3D Touch menus in iPadOS

3D Touch is dead. Long live 3D Touch! Even though Apple removed the 3D Touch hardware from iPhone 11, the company resurrected the feature via Haptic Touch on its latest devices (just the way it mimicked it with iPhone XR). And now that iPadOS is here, that means 3D Touch is coming to iPads (in the form of a medium-long press).

In the new iPad version of iOS, you can long-ish press on an app icon, and it will pop up the same 3D Touch menu as you would find on an iPhone. Let’s see how it looks.

3D Touch on iPad, no pressure

3D Touch is great, although Apple never really pushed¹ it. It should have always just been a faster version of a long press. Peek and Pop are more of an annoyance than a help, getting in the way of other long-press functions. Now, with 3D Touch’s functionality also available on iPad, perhaps it will finally be popularized and exploited. (One note: This behavior kind of works on iOS 12. Some apps will show a list of recent files when you long-ish press the icon, but it never really worked well.)

Anyhow, on to the screenshots.

iPadOS makes us happy

As you can see, this Just Works™. Any app that supports 3D Touch Home-screen shortcuts on iPhone will also expose them on the iPad in iPadOS. And, on the Maps app screenshot, you can see why. The last entry on the list is Show All Windows. This shows all the open windows for that app, gathering them together in a new App Exposé view. This is there to support iPadOS’ new multiple-window feature.

Perhaps the addition of a pseudo-3D Touch is just a side effect of this, but it’s one I’m very happy about.

1. Pun unintentional, but I shall accept full credit nonetheless. ↩