alt Hacker News> But a button that works like that in a GUI would feel wrong.
No, it doesn't. It feels way more responsive.
My pet peeve is "stopwatch apps" which trigger on release instead of on press. When timing something where fractions of a second matter, most people won't realize that it triggers on release and tap down when they want to start / stop, adding some arbitrary delay until they actually release the button.
No, even for stopwatch, trigger on release is the correct choice, as it’s more precise.
When tapping, I have to see, or in case of watching for some event to happen to stop the time, feel/guess when exactly the distance between screen and finger approaches zero. With a stop button triggered by release however, I can just calmly rest my finger on it and raise when the event happens, without any guesswork.