Should Apple add 3D Touch support to Notification Center in iOS?

If you have an Apple Watch then you know how easy it is to clear all notifications in Notification Center. There’s a button that’s easy to tap on the Apple Watch that gets rid of all notifications, but oddly enough the same feature is not found in iOS.

Should Apple add 3D Touch support to Notification Center in iOS? I’ll share my thoughts below, but here’s a sample of a recent thread on Reddit that explored the issue.

LordFrostCraig: ”Unless I’m just blind, there’s still no “Clear all notifications” button on the latest version of iOS. On Apple Watch clearing every notification is as easy as pressing a little harder on the notification slide down and tapping “Clear All.” Yet, on the iPhone, it’s a very tedious “Clear All” on an app-by-app basis.”

Rosebud: ”When there were rumors about “Force Touch for the iPhone 6S” I figured this was a given if true!”

Owlsrule: ”This is such an insignificant detail. Clear all is not a pressing issue. Not important. 3D Touch in Notification Center really needs to let you preview the notification in the app that it will go to, or do some other cool function to the notification that I haven’t thought of. Clear all would be a good addition too but really not the biggest area of focus for iPhone improvement”

Vitaminpicture: ”You act as though ideas and suggestions are mutually exclusive. Why not both?”

Jinxyface: ”In a company that prides themselves on getting the “little details” right, it’s kind of embarassing how such a basic functionality that would take like 5 minutes to code isn’t in their already buggy and unpolished OS.”

iMorphball: ”Why don’t you code it up in 5 minutes and shoot it over to Apple then?”

Thatmadcat: ”I figured that they’ve kept them separate as a marketing thing, but they might change it at some point.”

Thenewperson: ”They could just add a floating Clear All button at the bottom and use 3D Touch for features like owlrule mentioned. ”

More at Reddit

Adding 3D Touch support to Notification Center in iOS is a no-brainer

The lack of 3D Touch support in Notification Center is quite puzzling. You’d think that somebody at Apple would have realized the need for it before iOS 9 was released. It’s a pain in the rear end to have to clear notifications one by one in iOS, unlike on the Apple Watch where you can get rid of them with just one tap.

So why hasn’t Apple done it? The only reason I can think of is that the company has simply been too busy with other efforts to focus on adding 3D Touch to Notification Center in iOS. I know that that might seem hard to believe given all of Apple’s money and development resources, but even Apple can’t do everything all at once.

My guess is that we’ll probably see 3D Touch support added in iOS 10. While I would like to see it added sooner, I doubt very much that Apple will release it as an update to iOS 9. It’s certainly possible that they could do it that way, but such a feature would usually come in a major iOS update and not in a smaller patch for an existing version of iOS.

So stay tuned, and be patient. 3D Touch support for Notification Center in iOS is probably on the way. Until then we’ll all just have to keep tapping those notifications individually to get rid of them, unfortunately.

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