Detect Touch Events

Detect if the browser supports the Touch Events API.

Live detection test

Exports a reference to a singleton object (a micro state machine with an update function) with its state set to if the device supports the Touch Events API, as well as an update() function which re-runs the tests and updates the object's state.

Note that detect-touch-events is one of the micro state machines used by detect-it to determine if a device is mouseOnly, touchOnly, or hybrid.

For more information on the touch events api, please see MDN's Touch Events, or the W3C Touch Events specification.

detectTouchEvents micro state machine

const detectTouchEvents = {
  hasSupport: true / false,
  browserSupportsApi: true / false,

  // re-run all the detection tests and update state
  update() {...},
}

Installing detect-touch-events

$ npm install --save detect-touch-events

Using detect-touch-events

import detectTouchEvents from 'detect-touch-events';

// touch events api is present on a device with a touch screen - *most useful*
detectTouchEvents.hasSupport === true;

// browser supports the touch events api, but the device may or may not have a touch screen
detectTouchEvents.browserSupportsApi === true;

// updating the state - most apps won't need to use this at all
detectTouchEvents.update();

/*
 * note that in the case of a browser that doesn't support touch events,
 * including when using a legacy computer and browser, the default state will be:
 */
const detectTouchEvents = {
  hasSupport: false,
  browserSupportsApi: false,
}

Note that hasSupport is still just an api presence test and some browsers (notably Firefox) may give a false positive (saying it has support on a device without a touch screen), so it is recommended to use detect-it which factors in other tests as well to determine device capabilities.

Note that the update() function is run once at the time of import to set the object's initial state, and generally doesn't need to be run again. If it doesn't have access to the window, then the state will be undefined (detect-touch-events will not throw an error), and you will need to call the update() function manually at a later time to update its state.

Part of the detect-it family

• detect-it
  • detect-hover
  • detect-pointer
  • detect-touch-events
  • detect-passive-events