Zim Metro

Facebook is adding more 3D Touch tricks to its app, but it'll take 'months'

Peek and pop in your News Feed

Facebook's bringing more 3D Touch features to its primary app, allowing users with an iPhone 6S (or 6S Plus) to peek and pop links, profiles, and other content. Press lightly for a preview of whatever you're looking at, and then continue pressing if you want to open it fully. Facebook says peek and pop will work with "web links, profiles, pages, groups, events, photos, profile pictures, and cover photos." So even though the company is already trying to filter out some of the clickbait nonsence that can clutter the news feed, you'll be able to use 3D Touch to get a sense of whether something's really worth the "pop."

Facebook's also adding another "quick view" shortcut that pops up when you press down on its home screen icon; now there'll be one that takes you directly to your timeline. Facebook's app has supported 3D Touch since October with a few of these shortcuts for new status updates and uploading photos, mainly  but that's about it.

WHY SHOULD SOMETHING LIKE THIS TAKE MONTHS?

But here's the annoying thing: Facebook says it'll start rolling out these latest 3D Touch tricks to "a small group of people beginning today,"  with everyone else getting it "over the coming months." Yes, that's months. Not days. Not weeks. Months. Phased rollouts have become common for Silicon Valley's biggest companies (Apple excluded), but they're starting to get really frustrating. Some iPhone 6S users will have it, and others won't. The app will behave differently on the exact same hardware for months. That seems ridiculous.

We're seeing more and more apps get behind Apple's latest big iPhone feature, so why is Facebook playing it so safe? Instagram was among the first big ones to support 3D Touch . Oh well. If you're not yet able to use 3D Touch inside of Facebook yet, just be patient. Very patient.

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