Feature request: Tooltips on mobile

[personalizedrefriger]

Summary

• Currently a long press on a button doesn't display a tooltip on mobile.
• This makes it more difficult to tell what a button does without clicking on it.
• Draft pull request

Implementation options

• Create a Button component that has a toolTip property.
• Create a custom Tooltip component
  • How do we ensure that its children can be clicked? (Nesting Pressables doesn't seem to work...)
• Use an existing library
  • react-native-tooltips - npm (unmaintained?)
  • Tooltip | React Native Elements (part of a larger set of widgets, doesn't seem to work in its Expo demo...)

[Daeraxa]

Is that normal and expected mobile functionality? I'm not aware of anything similar that provides tooltips when holding buttons, could you give examples of apps that do?

[tomasz86]

If such tooltips are added, please enable them on hover too. This would work with stylus (and mouse), of course, but also e.g. Samsung phones have a built-in option to enable hover functionality with fingers.

@Daeraxa

Is that normal and expected mobile functionality? I'm not aware of anything similar that provides tooltips when holding buttons, could you give examples of apps that do?

I've seen it in a calendar app long time ago (to display event details in a month view), but it's probably not very common.

[personalizedrefriger]

At least on Android, they're quite common.

Examples on an Android emulator:

Contacts:

More

SMS Messaging

Files:

Alarms:

FDroid:

Settings

Of course, there are places I would expect such tooltips, but don't notice them. For example, the clear button in settings:

I think I've seen them on iOS, too...

[personalizedrefriger]

@tomasz86

If such tooltips are added, please enable them on hover too. This would work with stylus (and mouse), of course, but also e.g. Samsung phones have a built-in option to enable hover functionality with fingers.

This might be more difficult (touch and hold can easily be done with the built-in Pressable.onLongPress)... I'll look into it.

[Daeraxa]

Fair enough, don't think I've ever even tried to press and hold in that context before, to me it has always been a metaphor for a context menu à la right click (the F-Droid one seems particularly useless seeing as it already has the labels?).
I tried it on a few more Google apps, Gmail, Drive etc. and is part of Material Design so I have no issues for the Android implementation of it personally. - Material Design