Apple’s latest operating system update for its mobile devices, iOS 16, introduces a slew of new features like sleeker lock screens and message editing. However, when bringing in new things, it accidentally broke some others, and one of this week’s casualties was a whole bunch of rhythm games.
In iOS 16, tapping the screen with three fingers at the same time brings up a copy and paste menu, while three-finger swipe to undo and redo text inputs. That’s very handy if you’re using your iPhone for typing, but it’s not ideal if you’re just trying to adjust your fingers to hectic beats.
As these tweets and statements say, gamers like arcaea have found that every time they use three fingers at the same time – which is fairly common on harder tracks – various system functions are triggered and their gameplay is interrupted.
Here’s some gameplay footage of one of the Arcaea heavier tracks showing how many times players would tap (or even swipe) with three fingers at once:
While you’d think this would be a quick fix for Apple, the issue was raised when iOS 16 was still in beta but still made it into the first public release. It’s not the first time this has happened either. As 9to5mac reportsthe launch of iOS 13 in 2019 had similar problemswhen three-finger taps and gestures started making games like Fourteen days and PUBG.
Back then, the problem was solved by Apple telling iOS not to bother with the gestures if they were clearly not needed. For example, when the user plays a game. It’s a shame that this latest update was somehow left out, but hopefully now that it’s been publicly addressed a fix isn’t too far away.
Meanwhile, regular players of such games are urged to avoid updating to iOS 16.
