Oliver Haslam·

How To Mimic iPhone 6s 3D Touch On Older iPhone Models

If there is one thing that you can be sure of when a new release of iOS or a new iPhone is announced, it’s that jailbreakers will only be a step or so behind. With the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus going on sale this coming Friday, September 25th, the new phones’ marquee feature is without doubt 3D Touch which allows users to press harder than a tap in order to open new menus and added functionality. However, starting now, we already have a jailbreak tweak which attempts to mimic Apple’s new 3D Touch.

It’s no secret that older iPhones won’t be getting the breakthrough-feature as part of an iOS upgrade because, well, that’s just not possible as it’s all in the hardware of the new iPhones. That isn’t stopping the jailbreak community from trying to replicate it as best as they can though, with ForceTouchActivator now available to download for free from Cydia.

3D touch

At its core, ForceTouchActivator is an attempt to bring 3D Touch to older iPhones. Once installed, it uses the iPhone’s touchscreen to try and work out when a user is pressing firmly. The way this is done is by measuring the size of the finger press, radius and touch density, and then deciding whether that is a 3D Touch or not.

ForceTouchActivator

ForceTouchActivator needs to be configured in Activator as shown in the screenshot on the right.

It’s not ideal as the tweak itself can’t open any of the fancy menus seen on the iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus, but can be assigned to an Activator action at least, so there is some scope for doing cool things with a faux-3D Touch. It appears to be limited to just one action throughout the iOS environment for now, but for a free tweak, you really can’t complain now can you?

If this tweak was going to cost money then we wouldn’t recommend it because of its very limited scope, but with it being available for free we can’t see any reason not to at least try it out for yourself, especially if an iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus aren’t in your future.

ForceTouchActivator is free and can be downloaded from the BigBoss repository in Cydia right now.

Here’s a video demo of the tweak in action, courtesy TechMe0ut:

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