Android N brings a number of new features, but it turns out 3D Touch-style launcher shortcuts won’t be among them.
New documentation from the Android Developers site details the removal of the feature in eview 4, which probably won’t l for several weeks since eview 3 just went live on dnesday.
“’ve decided to defer this feature to a future release of Android. plan to remove the uncher Shortcuts As (ShortcutManager others) from the public Android N A starting in the next developer preview,” the site details.
+ uncher shortcuts give you quick access to specific functions inside of an app, much like the 3D Touch feature on iOS.
The feature is still in eview 3, so you can play around with it if you’ve downloaded Android N to a Nexus device. The concept is that developers can build in shortcuts to their app. Though unlike on the ione, it would require a gesture, such as swiping up or down, to implement. On iOS, 3D Touch works only with the ione 6S 6S us, which were engineered with pressure-sensitive displays.
ile a few Android developers dabbled with implementing such launcher actions, it appears that their learnings will need to be filed for a later date.
The story behind the story: Apple are in a constant battle to borrow one another’s features. 3D Touch is certainly something has its eyes on, as it makes jumping into a specific action much faster from the home screen. However, with Android there is a massive diversity of hardware: announced at I/O that 600 new Android devices have launched in the last year. So any new feature implementation needs to account for the massive fragmentation in screen sizes hardware out in the Android ecosystem.
