It looks like there’s growing consensus that Dynamic Island’s primary interaction model is wrong. Michael Tsai compiles commentary across two posts, which include people grumping about how a tap on Dynamic Island opens an app, whereas a long-press is required to expand what’s in the island to use its controls. Everyone from Nilay Patel at The Verge to John ‘Daring Fireball’ Gruber seems to want the opposite.

I’ve taken a contrary viewpoint. The iOS Home Screen has long had a similar interaction model. Whether you’re interacting with an icon or a widget, a tap opens an app, whereas a long press (and, previously, Force Touch) exists for actions. To my mind, Dynamic Island follows this existing convention, rather than making up new ones. So if a timer’s in the island, you tap-hold to perform a contextual action, or tap to open the item’s app. Even if you take a more desktop analogy of minimising to a ‘dock’ (which is in some ways how Dynamic Island presents), Apple is being consistent in this regard.

Rob Jonson on Twitter disagrees, arguing we’re effectively talking about a long press for a quick interaction and a tap for a deeper one (that is, opening the app), which “doesn’t seem right to me”. He asks: “Put it another way – is the dynamic island primarily the holder of the full app, or the holder of the expanded dynamic island?”

I’m clearly in the minority here (albeit, at present, a minority that includes Apple), but it’d feel odd to me if a long-press in Dynamic Island was the route to launching an app, just the same as it’d be weird elsewhere in the operating system.