Long press

Material spells the gesture out as one finger press, wait, lift, and the wait is the whole term. Everything else about it is identical to a tap: same finger, same place, same release. What the extra half second buys is a second meaning for the same spot, which is why long press is where touch keeps the things a mouse keeps behind a right click. Apple’s name for it is touch and hold, and both platforms own the threshold themselves rather than letting an interface pick one, so a design that depends on an exact duration is depending on a number it does not control.

The hold has to be paid for while it is happening. A press that looks like nothing for five hundred milliseconds and then produces a menu is indistinguishable from a press that did not register, so the interface owes the reader progress: a growing ring, a lift, a swelling of the pressed element, and on a phone the haptic tick that lands the moment the gesture commits. That feedback is also the cancel affordance. Once a reader can see the hold filling, lifting early reads as a decision rather than as a failure, and the tap the early lift becomes has to still do something sensible.

There is no long press event on the web. What there is is pointerdown, a timer you set yourself, and the several things that can invalidate it: a lift, a move past a few pixels of slop, a second contact, a scroll that starts under the finger. Android’s browser also fires contextmenu for a long press, which is either the behaviour you wanted or a competing menu you have to suppress, and a hold over text will start a selection unless user-select and touch-action say otherwise. The one rule worth stating flatly: never re-parent the element between the press and the release, because rebuilding the node the finger is on cancels the gesture the reader is halfway through making.

Because the gesture is invisible, it is an accelerator and never a door. Anything reachable by holding needs a visible route as well: an overflow menu on the row, an edit mode with its own button, a secondary click on the desktop. The people a hold-only interface locks out are specific. A hand with a tremor may not keep still long enough, a hand that presses firmly may lift too fast, and a screen reader has already spent both the tap and the hold on its own gestures. Material’s own compose is the honest version of the pattern: long-press drag, where holding picks a list item up and the drag that follows reorders it, with a visible drag handle for everyone who cannot hold.