How to force iPhone/iPod touch to handle more than 5 touches at the same time?

Question

I would like to develop a multi-touch (up to 8 fingers) application for iPhone/iPod Touch. But during testing on my 1st gen iPod Touch once I put the 6th finger weird things started to happen. I don't get Touch Began for the 6th finger nor Touch Ended/Cancelled for the first 5 fingers.

Do you know of any workaround for this? Does it behave the same on your iPhones/iPods? Would it work on G1 on Android?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can't. If you need that functionality you should file a feature request with Apple, but I suspect it is a hardware limitation that in the screen controller.

Answer 2

I would guess that 5 fingers is the upper limit. I imagine the engineers assumed most people have two hands with five fingers per hand, so the average person holding the phone in one hand only has five fingers to work with.

Holding your phone with just your thumbs seems precarious at best, so using it as a trumpet seems unlikely.

Answer 3

Just a note: the iPad can recognize 11 touches.

Answer 4

I have no idea if it would work on Android, but there will be an upper limit for the number of simultaneous touches that you can have. Future iPhones/iPods may up that limit, but it's not defined and you shouldn't assume that you can handle more than a few realistically.

Answer 5

As far as Android is concerned, right now I don't believe there's multi-touch support due to Google having removed support for it as per Apple's request.

Answer 6

The system is only capable of tracking 5 finger touches at once. You should only ever get 5 touch events at the same time, I think anything over that is ignored.

You're probably seeing odd behavior because its not consistently picking the same 5 out of 8 fingers to report touch events on.