3D Touch was one of the selling points of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus from last year, but unfortunately it did not exactly catch on the same way that Touch ID did. However with iOS 10, Apple has introduced a ton of changes that will make 3D Touch more compelling than ever, and one of those changes is the introduction of rich notifications.The good news is that if you don’t own a 3D Touch iPhone, fret not because Apple has reassured developers (and thus users) that rich notifications will be available to older iPhones as well. In the notes accompanying the first iOS 10 beta, it reads, “Support for rich notifications is optimized for 3D Touch, and in iOS 10 beta 1 the feature is available only on iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. Future betas will provide access to this functionality for users of iPhone models without support for 3D Touch.”
It is unclear as to how rich notifications will work on older iPhones, but as we have seen in apps like Instagram, a long-hold on a photo will let it pop up the same way on a 3D Touch iPhone, so perhaps that’s a possibility. However given that we’re still in the early beta of iOS 10, there is a good chance Apple is still figuring this one out themselves.
In case you missed Apple’s presentation at WWDC, one of the examples of rich notifications was how users could open up a chat thread on Messages and reply to it all from the lockscreen, as you can see in the screenshot above.