So quick question, I'm curious, and no one has really shed any light on this. Many modern capacitive touchscreens even on for example the Nexus 4 can distinguish pressure on the touchscreen, and there have been xPosed modules that can utilize this feature. How is this honestly different than force touch? And what kind of reliability are we expecting here? If there is a type of membrane that is depressed and activates the iPhones context menus, isn't that a wear part? Will this be something that will supposedly fail after a certain amount of presses? Also, how is this different than the Android long press context menus? Probably not by much, this will be an interesting feature to see implemented into new phones since things that Apple elaborates on ends up finding its way onto other devices.... Inputs?
From what I heard, 3D touch is achieved by many sensors somewhere around the back light of the device that are able to detect minuscule amounts of flex in the touch screen. It seems as though so far, this achieves pretty much the same actually as android context menus but could have different applications for games and in the future.
I wasn't aware of the Nexus 4 or any android device having something like this. Upon looking into it, unless I found the wrong thing, it seems as though the detection principle behind that is actually based on the surface area taken by a single touch, and not actually by the amount of pressure applied.
I did forget to mention that Huawei actually did show a feature similar to this for the Mate S.
Force Touch is realistically a "Marketing" Gimmick. all Apple did was add a "Right Click" to iOS and WatchOS. that's about it. that's all it does. as for the capacitive pressure sensing. versus force touch. if you want to get down to it. there is no difference. they both do the same crap. it's just one does a feature. they other doesn't (Capacitive pressure).