How to Get 3D Touch Quick Actions on Older iPhones

Apple released the iPhone 6s last month with a cool special feature called 3D Touch. Here’s how to get 3D Touch on older iPhones.

If you’re not familiar with 3D Touch, it’s a new imaging technology that can only be found on the iPhone 6s. It can essentially capture pressure sensitivity, so pressing harder on the screen brings up alternative options and shortcuts instead of tapping the screen to open an app or select something.

3D Touch has several different components. First, there are Quick Actions, which you can access directly from the home screen, which are essentially shortcuts for different things in a given app, so if I hit Tweetbot to enable 3D Touch, I would get a few shortcuts. It’s about that app like Tweet, Tweet Last Photo, and Show Activity.

Another feature of 3D Touch is Peek and Pop, so if you’re inside an app, you can press a link or photo and get a quick popup preview of that item. Pressing it further will completely open this link inside Safari.

While 3D Touch is an iPhone 6s exclusive feature, you can easily get some features on older iPhones.

You can enable Quick Actions on devices other than iPhone 6s by long pressing the app icons on the home screen. Here’s how.

jailbreak iOS 9

The first thing you need to do is jailbreak your iPhone in iOS 9. An iOS 9 jailbreak was recently released, and the installation process is as easy as can be.

You’ll need a Windows computer, your iPhone, and some time, but we have a helpful tutorial that takes you through the process.

Of course, jailbreak isn’t for everyone, so if you’re feeling a little apprehensive about jailbreaking your iPhone, it might be best to stay away. However, if you feel good and want 3D Touch on your old iPhone, jailbreak it.

Install RevealMenu

RevealMenu is the Cydia tweak you will want to install to get 3D Touch Quick Actions on your old iPhone. There’s also a tweak called Forcy that can do the same, so it’s really just a preference for which one you want to install or which developer you want to support.

After installing RevealMenu, you can immediately start using 3D Touch Quick Actions by long pressing an app that supports 3D Touch. You’ll notice that it works just like the iPhone 6s, but without pressure sensitivity.

If you want to add more effects to 3D Touch on your old iPhone, you can install a Cydia tweak called Hapticle that adds some power feedback every time you activate 3D Touch. This gives your old iPhone more of the real feel that real 3D Touch offers on the iPhone 6s.

The only issue I’m running into is that 3D Touch doesn’t actually work for a handful of random apps that support 3D Touch. We’re not sure if this is a bug with RevealMenu, or if Apple (or the app itself) can detect that you’re using a jailbreak tweak and say “oh sorry, you can’t use fake 3D Touch here”.

However, you can install another jailbreak tweak called Shortcuts, which provides 3D Touch Quick Actions for apps that don’t yet officially support it, like the Weather app or even Cydia, and also adds more shortcuts to Spotify.

At this point, you should have a pretty great jailbreak setup when it comes to 3D Touch. Of course, since you long press to activate 3D Touch, that means the gesture to enable jiggly mode for deleting and moving apps has changed. Simply swipe up on any app icon to activate vibrate mode.

While the iPhone 6s definitely implements 3D Touch better than these jailbreak settings, having the ability to use Quick Actions on older iPhones is something that will get many users who don’t want to upgrade to the iPhone 6s get excited.