iPhone SE’s Haptic Touch Doesn’t Work in Notification Center, Apparently by Design

A lot of complaints about this, and rightly so, from folks upgrading to the new SE from older iPhones that supported 3D Touch. I didn’t take note of this while reviewing the SE, because I didn’t realize (or remember really) that older phones in the 6/7/8 form factor used 3D Touch for acting on notifications. You can get to the same actions by swiping right to left on a notification and tapping the View button, but still. If the SE supports Haptic Touch at all — and it does — I don’t understand why it wouldn’t support Haptic Touch events for notifications.

There are a lot of small differences between the pre-iPhone-X user interface and post-iPhone-X user interface in iOS. When I first heard about this issue with notifications on the SE, I thought it was something that wasn’t supported in the pre-X interface. But it is — but only on phones with 3D Touch. But the whole thing with 3D Touch and Haptic Touch is so confusing, and has been handled so poorly by Apple in terms of how 3D Touch was used in iOS and which devices had it and which did not (no iPad ever had 3D Touch, for example), that you can’t possibly expect regular iPhone buyers to understand that the reason the new SE doesn’t support long-pressing notifications to act on them is that (a) it has the pre-X Touch ID user interface, and (b) doesn’t have 3D Touch. I’m not even entirely sure that that’s the full explanation for why this is, and it’s my job to stay on top of stuff like this. All I know is that there is only one iPhone in Apple’s current lineup that doesn’t support long-pressing notifications and that phone is the SE, the very newest model, and that doesn’t make sense.

★ Tuesday, 28 April 2020