Taptic in iOS 9

Question

Can you use the taptic engine in iOS 9 with iPhone 6s? WatchOS2 and OS X have the ability to use the haptic engine, so I assumed it would be in iOS 9 too, but I coudn\'t find an

Answer 1

There is currently no public available API in iOS 9 and iOS 9.1.

Disclaimer: There is a way to interact with Taptic Engine directly, but there is a private method. You should not use it in App Store applications.

However, if you are more into experimenting, then you can find that there is a new private class available in iOS 9: _UITapticEngine. You can find it's header here. To get to it, there is a new property on UIDevice class, called _tapticEngine. See the full header for UIDevice here. You can go ahead and import those headers, or just use NSSelectorFromString function and performSelector: method to get to the taptic engine:

id tapticEngine = [[UIDevice currentDevice] performSelector:NSSelectorFromString(@"_tapticEngine") withObject:nil];
[tapticEngine performSelector:NSSelectorFromString(@"actuateFeedback:") withObject:@(1001)]; // Peek
[tapticEngine performSelector:NSSelectorFromString(@"endUsingFeedback:") withObject:@(1002)]; // Pop

This will activate the taptic engine for specific gesture, although both Peek and Pop feel similar to me. If you specify any other constant, it will default to a vibration.

I have put together a quick test repo together on GitHub, that includes a Swift-compatible API to use the taptic engine:

UIDevice.currentDevice().tapticEngine().actuateFeedback(UITapticEngineFeedbackPeek)

Use at your own risk!

I've also written a bit longer blog post, explaining this.