# Handling touches in your view Use touch events directly on a view subclass if touch handling is intricately linked to the view’s content. ## Discussion If you don’t plan to use gesture recognizers with a custom view, you can handle touch events directly from the view itself. Because views are responders, they can handle Multi-Touch events and many other types of events. When UIKit determines that a touch event occurred in a view, it calls the view’s [`touchesBegan(_:with:)`](/documentation/UIKit/UIResponder/touchesBegan(_:with:)), [`touchesMoved(_:with:)`](/documentation/UIKit/UIResponder/touchesMoved(_:with:)), or [`touchesEnded(_:with:)`](/documentation/UIKit/UIResponder/touchesEnded(_:with:)) method. You can override these methods in your custom views and use them to provide a response to touch events. The methods you override in your views (or in any responder) to handle touches correspond to different phases of the touch event-handling process. For example, the following image illustrates the different phases of a touch event. When a finger (or Apple Pencil) touches the screen, UIKit creates a [`UITouch`](/documentation/UIKit/UITouch) object, sets the touch location to the appropriate point, and sets its [`phase`](/documentation/UIKit/UITouch/phase-swift.property) property to [`UITouch.Phase.began`](/documentation/UIKit/UITouch/Phase-swift.enum/began). When the same finger moves around the screen, UIKit updates the touch location and changes the [`phase`](/documentation/UIKit/UITouch/phase-swift.property) property of the touch object to [`UITouch.Phase.moved`](/documentation/UIKit/UITouch/Phase-swift.enum/moved). When the user lifts the finger from the screen, UIKit changes the [`phase`](/documentation/UIKit/UITouch/phase-swift.property) property to [`UITouch.Phase.ended`](/documentation/UIKit/UITouch/Phase-swift.enum/ended) and the touch sequence ends.  Similarly, the system may cancel an ongoing touch sequence at any time; for example, when an incoming phone call interrupts the app. When it does, UIKit notifies your view by calling the [`touchesCancelled(_:with:)`](/documentation/UIKit/UIResponder/touchesCancelled(_:with:)) method. You use that method to perform any needed cleanup of your view’s data structures. UIKit creates a new [`UITouch`](/documentation/UIKit/UITouch) object for each new finger that touches the screen. The touches themselves are delivered with the current [`UIEvent`](/documentation/UIKit/UIEvent) object. UIKit distinguishes between touches originating from a finger and from Apple Pencil, and you can treat each of them differently. > Important: > In its default configuration, a view receives only the first ``doc://com.apple.uikit/documentation/UIKit/UITouch`` object associated with an event, even if more than one finger is touching the view. To receive the additional touches, you must set the view’s ``doc://com.apple.uikit/documentation/UIKit/UIView/isMultipleTouchEnabled`` property to true. You can also configure this property in Interface Builder using the Attributes inspector. ## Topics ### Advanced touch handling [Implementing a Multi-Touch app](/documentation/UIKit/implementing-a-multi-touch-app) Learn how to create a simple app that handles multitouch input. [Getting high-fidelity input with coalesced touches](/documentation/UIKit/getting-high-fidelity-input-with-coalesced-touches) Learn how to support high-precision touches in your app. [Minimizing latency with predicted touches](/documentation/UIKit/minimizing-latency-with-predicted-touches) Create a smooth and responsive drawing experience using UIKit’s predictions for touch locations. --- Copyright © 2026 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. | [Terms of Use](https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/terms/site.html) | [Privacy Policy](https://www.apple.com/privacy/privacy-policy)