Android N will support pressure-sensitive screens

Android N is going to make it easier for device makers to create their own version of 3D Touch pressure-sensitive screens on their devices. Hopefully, when it's officially released, Google will figure out what to call the feature — because Apple 3D Touch is obviously Apple branding, and "support for pressure-sensitive screens" is an awful thing to have to write over and over again.

So how do we know? Well, support for "Launcher shortcuts" is probably the most exciting new thing in the latest beta for the upcoming Android N operating system, which was released last week. It allows developers to "define shortcuts which users can expose in the launcher to help them perform actions quicker." Which is a fairly technical way of describing what people can do now with an iPhone 6S in its launcher: get a pop-up menu that lets you jump directly into a more specific part of your app.

Read more...