Unlike Touch ID that launched with the iPhone 5s and has since inspired many smartphone makers to introduce similar security features on their products, 3D Touch/Force Touch did not appear to have the same runaway success despite the fact that there were many rumors last year that phones in 2016 will sport the feature.
However it seems that Google is working on preparing for that eventuality that Android OEMs will introduce pressure-sensitive displays. According to a blog post on the Android Developers page, it mentions Launcher shortcuts which reads, “Now, apps can define shortcuts which users can expose in the launcher to help them perform actions quicker.”
This seemed to hint at pressure-sensitive displays to which the folks at Phandroid and Nova Launcher’s developer Kevin Barry teamed up to put the theory to the test (see video above), and the results seem to have confirmed it. The Verge also reached out to Google for confirmation to which they basically acknowledged it.
According to Google, it seems that there are OEMs who would prefer the software side of pressure-sensitive displays be built into the operating system itself, which is why Google has introduced the feature in Android N. This should at the very least help to standardize things, kind of like what Google did with Android 6.0 Marshmallow when they introduced native fingerprint support.
Which OEM will introduce pressure-sensitive displays that will take advantage of the feature built into Android N remains to be seen, but at the very least we know that it is there.