The touch screen of our mobile detects different pressure points, the time that we hold down the finger on the screen. In short, our finger is a kind of mouse pointer that can execute both main and secondary actions. One of them is to leave pressed, but it is a function that we can also modify to our liking.
There are hundreds of times we touch the mobile screen every day, but if we stop to think about it, there are also several gestures to interact with it . We can give a simple touch, slide the screen or press it for a longer time. It is precisely this last gesture, also known as a long press, that we can change to our liking. However, as with many other interesting options, this function is less visible than expected, since we will have to dive through the Accessibility options.
Why change it?
There are many times when this option may need to be changed, for example when a user inadvertently activates the long press , when in reality they just want to touch one item. This is an example where a longer time option should be chosen. In this way, we can adjust how much time must pass for a touch on the screen to be considered a long press.
How to do it
Long press is frequently used to drag icons across the screen, but it is also used to open context menus in various applications, such as opening new tabs in a browser or saving an image from the web. To be able to change this function in Android, we will have to go to the accessibility options. Depending on the mobile, it may be more or less hidden within a sub-menu, but it will always be found within Accessibility. We can also search for it in the options search drawer by typing “keystroke” or “hold down delay”.
Once done we will have three options to choose from: short, medium or long. Short makes the time between keystroke and action shorter , while longer mode requires the most time. The system places this option in intermediate by default. We may have to try among the different options before confirming the one that best suits our type of pulsation. Once we select the option, we will only have to go to the main menu and test the new selection, pressing to drag an icon from the desktop.