What functionality is missing? What is unsatisfying with the current situation?
Currently, tooltips of all kinds are effectively non-functional on touch interfaces, such as smartphones, tablets, and 2-in-1 laptops. This includes article preview tooltips, variables, and manually inserted tooltips.
This is due to the nature of a touch interface not interacting well with a "hover" event. Touch interfaces typically do not register "where" the mouse is on the screen, and as such, it is nearly impossible to render a tooltip on these touch interfaces.
Here is a video demonstration of the user experience on a touch interface.
(Just in case a YT embed does not render in a feature suggestion, here is a link instead)
This is very unfortunate in my opinion. It is important to me and my use-case that potential readers can have a pleasant experience when reading my world from a touch-interface device.
How does this feature request address the current situation?
By making tooltips functional on touch interfaces, you would be dramatically improving the user experience for touch interface users. Variables and tooltips are powerful tools that I am sure many users enjoy employing, and it is a shame that they are effectively unusable on touch interfaces.
The simplest solution I can think of to this issue is to make tooltips render when clicked, in addition to when hovered over. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the current method of hovering be replaced. This would be in addition to that. For desktop users, the experience should be unchanged. But for touch users, they could now tap on the tooltip and have it render. As for dismissing the tooltip, it could be time-based or be dismissed with a second click, the latter probably being preferable.
This solution alone would not fix the issue of article preview tooltips for touch interfaces, unfortunately. Because those tooltips are also links, clicking on them would still act first as a link. However, for touch users currently, this is already how it functions. I believe this implementation would still be an overall improvement for touch users.
But I am not a programmer. I have not considered all the use-cases and am not sure if implementation would be as simple as I make it seem or if even possible. However I would like to gauge community interest in this and leave it up to the developers to determine how it can be implemented.
The Team's Response
This feature has not gathered enough support during its voting period.
In addition as the Fierce Orc said above, there are ways to simulate mouseovers for both Android and iOS (click and hold the link that has the mouseover effect).
World Anvil is not a mobile application- there are ways to simulate mouse overs if you know your mobile device - this is going to be wasted development time - there are much better ways to use the time
I am only on mobile. I currently generally hard press which gives me a second to read the tool tip before it kicks in Androud's default hard press to select. Repeat until I read the whole tool tip. This suggestion woukd be a large QoL improvement.