Unsure if you know: you can press and hold the space bar to enable text navigation by swiping.

You can just hold down the spacebar to move the cursor. I assume Android does this as well?

iOS 13 added a whole set of gestures that all key off of three-fingered interactions with the screen. Just tapping with three fingers shows that bar, which is probably all you're managing to do accidentally.

The rest: three-fingered pinch-closed to copy ("picking up"); three-fingered pinch-open to paste ("putting down"); three-finger swiping left/right for undo/redo... and three-finger double-tap for an undo shortcut.

Totally agree this is undiscoverable, but it's also fairly well gated behind a single root gesture so once you understand the trigger it's memorable.

In iOS 7 a gesture from the left side towards the right navigates back in an app.

It's not though. The feature implemented with haptic touch only lets you long press on space bar and move the cursor. You have to use a second finger to start selection and control the bounds, and it's far less accurate.

With 3D touch, you could press down once to start cursor mode, again to start selection, and again to stop. You could also reset the selection while staying in cursor mode. I was able to, quite frequently, change entire sentences and edit text really efficiently with a single hand holding the phone. That's impossible now.

I'd be really happy if Apple went back and improved the spacebar cursor system, but right now it's objectively worse as it requires two fingers rather than one to select text.

Still using it in the same way as a mouse. The thing that set the iOS UI apart is direct manipulation of the UI. E.g. instead of using a scrollbar/arrows to scroll, you use your finger to move the page around. Instead of clicking a checkbox you move a slider. Instead of clicking a "zoom in" button you 'stretch' the photo out using your fingers. etc.

I don't think it was meant to be used frequently. More comparable to press-and-hold to enter the app removal/dragging state.

Dont forget that iOS has an almost universal left swipe gesture that doesn't require acknowledging the top left-back chevron

It also has an optional swipe down gesture at the very bottom of the screen to cut the screen size in half, useful for hitting the back button if you have to

So the cursor navigation feature activates on long press of the space bar, in iPhone models that don't have 3D touch?

I wouldn't mind those, especially if it relates to multitasking. Sometimes I hold phone with two hands.

Force-swipe to switch tabs on Safari, force-swipe two fingers to switch apps.

B. I don't have a new iOS device, but hearing about 3D touch makes me immediately think of right-click, and how Apple traditionally eschewed such an interaction. Or at least made it difficult with one-button mice.

This comment from the OP was particularly interesting:

> For Instagram, 3D Touch is much more than a 2015 version of the “right click”. The interaction adds another level of depth and carries a different intent. You aren’t yet committed to navigating to the content, but it's clear that you are interested. With this in mind, Peek and Pop gives you a glimpse of what lies ahead and lets you quickly back out to continue browsing.

Isn't a "3D Touch" a physically more demanding action than just a traditional tap? Why should the former be associated with a "quick peek" and the latter with a committed selection, rather than vice versa? (Besides the fact that 3D touch isn't yet available to the majority of iOS users?). Not a criticism of Instagram's decision here, just funny how things can seem counter-intuitive in the written description of them. Though in practice, it makes sense...a deep-click to preview, then a release to back out of the modal, is easier than a single-click to preview, than another single click to close the modal.

In a traditional OS interface, a single-click was used to signify a non-committal selection, and a double-click signified action. And that makes more sense as a double-click, like a "3D touch", takes more time and physical pressure. Of course the problem with a double-click is that double-click speeds among users can vary quite drastically, resulting in false positives and negatives. Will 3D touch mitigate these issues or fall into the same trap? Again, haven't experienced it but everytime I hear of the description of 3D touch, it doesn't sound much different than "click-and-hold"...which more or less worked OK in such apps as Kindle on IOS (for highlighting).

Is there a distinction between a traditional click-and-hold, versus a singular 3D deep click, and then a 3D-deep-click-and-hold? Seems like there could be more ambiguity there than there was in the slow-single-clicks vs double-click problem.

The issue I can see is that I need to do multiple actions.

Worst case: Pick up phone, unlock/pin, find and open app, wait for a moment, find option and press it. Best case: swipe on reminder, unlock, tap option.

The issue with the best case is that the 'cancel' action still has way less friction than the other. It is zero friction to ignore it but still 1-2 steps to do it.

The optimal case would be to be presented with the options on the lockscreen.

Perhaps you could schedule a minimum amount of notifications and display them at the same time?

Like at 7pm:

I am cleaning.

I am making dinner.

Etc. This way only one swipe would trigger the action (+pin). But it might be hard to get just right. But you see my point.

Anyway good luck. And for what it's worth, I'm still developing on an iPhone 4 as well :)

What's fiddly about buttons? It's much faster than swiping a couple of times to get to the option you want.

Since iOS 9. Early in the betas this feature existed for non-3D Touch iPhones as well, but then it was removed and restricted to models with 3D Touch.

That's also discussed in the blog post I linked. tl;dr: Only a small subset of users (3-7%) uses a swipe gesture to open these menus (all others use the hamburger menu) and these users have to adapt now to do different kinds of swipes for opening the menu and invoking the back gesture.

What would make more sense is to add faster direct manipulation gestures. There's opportunity for that, without throwing out the whole paradigm.

For example, today to select a range of text you:

   1. Tap-and-hold to bring up the cursor magnifying glass
   2. Let go to bring up the context menu
   3. Tap "select" from the menu
   4. Drag one of the endpoints to one end of the selection
   5. Adjust the other endpoint if necessary

   1. Tap-and-hold to bring up the cursor magnifying glass
   2. While holding, use a second finger to drag out the desired selection!

The way you wrote this makes it seem like swiping up instead of left or right is really horrible and confusing. Why? Previous versions of Android had a totally different lock screen design, so I honestly do not know why you feel so confident that the correct swiping direction should be left or right. Because Apple did it that way?