---
name: Force touch
slug: force-touch
category: interaction
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A press whose depth is part of the input, letting a harder press
  mean something different from a light one on a pressure sensing surface.
aliases:
  - name: 3D Touch
    source: hig
  - name: force click
    source: hig
  - name: pressure touch
    source: community
  - name: deep press
    source: community
tags:
  - pointer
  - touch
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - long-press
    - pressure-sensitivity
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - haptic-feedback
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "iOS HIG: Gestures"
    url: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/gestures
  - title: "MDN: Force Touch events (non-standard)"
    url: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Force_Touch_events
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: press depth carries meaning, not just contact
---

Force touch is a press with a third dimension. The contact reports how hard it is pushing,
and the interface watches that reading for a line being crossed: past the first threshold a
preview lifts, past the second the preview commits and becomes the thing itself. Apple
shipped the idea twice under two names, as Force Touch on the 2015 trackpad and as 3D Touch
on the iPhone 6s, and gave the two thresholds names that stuck: peek and pop. The specimen
above performs the press rather than picking its outcome: the finger holds the row, the
reported pressure climbs while the gauge reads it, and each mark fires as it is crossed. A
pointer with no force sensor makes the same gesture by holding, buying depth with time,
which is the very trade Haptic Touch later made official.

The contrast with [pressure sensitivity](/pressure-sensitivity) is worth stating flatly,
since the two read the same sensor. Pressure sensitivity maps a continuous force onto a
continuous property, so every value along the axis means something and the stroke keeps
getting wider the harder the pen is pushed. Force touch throws almost all of that away: it
watches the axis for two lines and produces a discrete command, which makes it a button with
deep travel rather than a dial. That is also why it leans on
[haptic feedback](/haptic-feedback) harder than any other gesture. Depth is invisible, the
finger never moves, and without a tick at each threshold a reader cannot tell a press that
fired from a press that did not.

The web never got a standard for it. WebKit exposed force clicks through non-standard events
(`webkitmouseforcewillbegin`, `webkitmouseforcedown` and their siblings) plus a
`webkitForce` reading and two constants naming the thresholds, and nothing else ever
implemented them. What is standard is `pressure` on a pointer event, which most hardware
reports as a flat 0.5 for the whole time a button is held, so a threshold built on the web
is mostly a number the interface cannot trust. Apple retired the hardware too: the iPhone XR
and everything after it replaced 3D Touch with Haptic Touch, which is a
[long press](/long-press) wearing the same clothes, and the peek it lifts is now bought with
time instead of force.

The design lesson survived the hardware. Nothing on a screen announces that a target can be
pressed harder, so force touch was only ever an accelerator, and everything it reached had
to have a visible route as well: a row of actions, an overflow menu, a plain tap that opens
the same record. It also has to be forgiving in both directions, because a firm tapper fires
peeks nobody asked for and a light one never reaches the first mark at all. The preview a
peek lifts is a [quick view](/quick-view) by another name, which is the honest way to read
the whole pattern: a good idea about previewing, delivered through an input almost nobody
could discover.