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Why I think the most unique feature in the iPhone 6s is totally useless

I've owned an iPhone 6S for three months now — as long as it's been available — but I've completely forgotten about its most unique feature: 3D Touch.

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At the iPhone 6S unveiling in September, Apple advertised 3D Touch as "just as profound as multi-touch," the innovation that introduced the world to swiping, pinching and zooming on smartphones. 

But that's not the case. In fact, calling 3D Touch just as profound as multi-touch couldn't be further from the truth.

iphone 6s 3d touch
Apple/Tech Insider

You can't use the iPhone — any iPhone — without using multi-touch. You can easily, however, use your iPhone 6S without ever using 3D Touch, either accidentally or on purpose.

If you don't own an iPhone 6S or you're unfamiliar with how 3D Touch works, all it does is let you push into the iPhone's screen to access new shortcuts and menu options for your apps. So you can, for example, start composing a tweet by pressing hard into the Twitter app icon on your phone, or get directions home just by pushing into Apple's Maps app icon.

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3D Touch also does two other notable things: You can switch into one of many already-open apps by pushing into the side of the display, and you can "peek" at things like photos, emails, or hyperlinks to get a preview of what they are, or push into the screen a bit further to "pop" out that content into a new window.

In theory, all of this sounds useful. Everyone loves shortcuts! But in practice, 3D Touch is only saving you one or two taps at best. It doesn't do anything your phone can't already do, it just does it a bit quicker.

The main problem with 3D Touch is that so few apps actually support the function. Sure, most Apple apps work with 3D Touch, and so does Facebook and Twitter. But it doesn't work with a vast majority of the apps I frequently use, including Reddit's Alien Blue app, Google Hangouts, Uber, LinkedIn, and dozens of others. 

In Apple's defense, this is only the beginning of 3D Touch. Apple only recently introduced this kind of pressure-sensitive functionality this year — first in the Apple Watch and the new MacBook (known as "Force Touch" on those devices) released towards the beginning of the year, and now in the iPhone 6S. Apple reportedly won't bring 3D Touch to the next year's iPads, but it'll almost certainly be in next year's iPhone, presumably called iPhone 7.

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Meanwhile, other companies clearly think Apple is on to something. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Samsung will add a feature similar to 3D Touch to its next flagship phone, the Galaxy S7.

By this time next year, 3D Touch will be in more people's hands. By then, I hope Apple and developers for its iOS and OS X platforms can come up with more clever applications for this clever but underwhelming technology.

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