How to receive single tap and hold Remote-Control Event with iOS

Question

I'm looking for my app to listen for the single tap and hold of the play/pause button on headphones for iOS devices. Currently, the behavior is to start Voice Control (on my iPhone 4).

The event list for remote control events allows for getting the double tap and hold (BeginSeekingForward) and the release (EndSeekingForward), but I'm looking for the single tap and hold which currently activates Voice Control.

Is there a way for my app to override Voice Control and listen for the single tap and hold?

 

Answer 1

You can add in a UILongPressGestureRecognizer to your UIButton and work from there.

If you want to prevent your other method from being called, you'll also need a UITapGestureRecognizer that counts taps and sets a value to true when it receives a second tap and another method (Check from your UIResponder touch* methods) for a touch release and set the value back to false.

Using that value, you can check with the UILongPressGestureRecognizer to see if the user double tapped or not.

Alternatively, you could also just have the value set to false upon a touch to the button that doesn't have a tap count of two.

Hope this helps!

EDIT: You cannot override the headphones (as far as I know) without jailbreaking the device. Normally you should never have to code for people interacting using the Apple headphones, since that would severely reduce the market and usability of your app. If someone were to forget their headphones, for example, they could not utilize your app. Its just something to think about. You don't want to limit your apps accessibility too much.