What is contextmenu?

ContextMenu is a small Swift library for iOS apps that lets a developer show a dropdown style menu at the exact point a user long presses on the screen, rather than tying that menu to a visible button. It is built for content areas like drawing canvases, document previews, editors, maps, and 3D scenes, where you want a right click style menu to appear wherever the user touched. Apple's UIKit already offers two related tools, but neither fits this exact case well on its own. Button menus are easy to set up but need a visible button. The system's context menu interaction can attach to any content and knows where the user pressed, but it presents using a different, heavier style than a normal dropdown menu. ContextMenu works around this gap by creating a temporary, invisible button at the pressed location and using it to trigger the standard dropdown menu, so the result looks and behaves like a normal button menu but can appear anywhere in a view. On newer versions of iOS, specifically iOS 17.4 and later, this invisible button trick gives the full standard dropdown appearance. On slightly older versions, iOS 16 through 17.3, the library automatically falls back to a different system menu style called the edit menu interaction, since the newer technique is not available there. The library supports apps built for iOS 14 and later, and Mac Catalyst 14 and later, though menus themselves only appear starting on iOS 16. Developers install it through Swift Package Manager and attach it to any UIView by providing a small function that returns the menu contents for a given touch location, or returns nothing if no menu should appear there. It is released under the MIT license.