3D touch on iPhones adds quick launch options to app icons. For example, the camera app can be launched directly in selfie mode if you use its 3D touch shortcuts. The thing is, if you don’t have a 3D touch device, you can still take a selfie. The absence of 3D touch on your iPhone doesn’t bar you from taking selfies. 3D touch, as a feature, shouldn’t lock users out of essential features and it has been doing that as far as iOS 11 is concerned. iOS 12 is fixing this; you can finally clear all notifications on a non-3D touch iPhone.
Swipe down on your home screen to bring up the Notifications shade. The cross button that normally only cleared notifications for one app, will now be able to clear all notifications. Press and hold on the cross button and you will see the “Clear All Notifications” option. Tap it and watch the magic happen.
If you’re wondering how you can clear all notifications for a particular app instead of clearing all notifications, you can do it by swiping left on the notification stack and tapping the Clear all option.
A few other changes that now let users with non-3D touch iPhones use 3D touch actions include using the trackpad, and controlling the brightness of the flashlight. The flashlight brightness control for non-3D touch iPhones was added in iOS 11 as was the control for the timer.
So the change is basically Apple replacing the 3D touch with a long-press gesture. This can, in theory, work for anything and everything 3D touch related. You don’t need special hardware to replicate it. In fact, Google has something similar called App Shortcuts.
App Shortcuts don’t require special hardware. You simply long-press on an app’s shortcut on the home screen and quick actions appear in a small menu. You can tap any one of them to launch the app. For example, you can use Chrome’s app shortcut to open a new tab. This beats opening Chrome which will open to the last tab you had open and instead just let you open a new tab.
Basically, you can use every 3D touch feature on a non-3D touch iPhone if Apple were to add support for it. There are rumors that an upcoming iPhone model may not have 3D touch and that is why Apple is making these changes. The changes allow users who once owned a 3D touch device to do the essentials but not be bothered with the app shortcuts.
