Android Q to add support for 'deep presses' similar to Apple's 3D Touch

3D Touch, first introduced in iOS 9 on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, offered an intuitive pressure-sensitive way to quickly access content and sub-menus for supported apps. Android phones haven't had such a feature apart from long press shortcuts provided by stock and third-party launchers. This could soon change with Android Q.

Documentation for the MotionEvent object in Android Q that reports movements from mouse, pen, finger, and trackball reveals a new input type called 'deep press'. From the developer docs,

The current event stream represents the user intentionally pressing harder on the screen. This classification type should be used to accelerate the long press behaviour."

This implies that deep press is a quicker way of accessing options that would have been exposed via a long press. The documentation does not talk about different functions that can be offered by varying levels of pressure sensitivity as is the case with Apple's 3D Touch implementation.

It is also not known whether deep press would require new hardware or Google would offer some sort of emulation that existing touchscreens can use to simulate a 3D Touch-like experience. Android Q is still in development so we might see OEMs offering deep press-compatible hardware as we near launch.