UITextView link tap recognition is delayed

If you still want to go with a native UITextView, you can add a tap recognizer to your textview and get the string attributes at the tap location. When you find a link, you can open it immediately.

I wrote a Gist that solves this for iOS 7/8. It’s a lightweight extension of UITextView that also forwards -[UITextViewDelegate textView:shouldInteractWithURL:inRange:] and exposes the internal tap gesture recognizer.

https://gist.github.com/benjaminbojko/c92ac19fe4db3302bd28

Here’s a quick example:The example below only works on iOS 8. See the gist above for iOS 7 + 8 support.

Add your tap recognizer:

// ...

UITapGestureRecognizer *tapRecognizer = [[UITapGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self action:@selector(tappedTextView:)];
[myTextView addGestureRecognizer:tapRecognizer];
myTextView.selectable = YES; // otherwise the gesture won't recognize

// ...

And add your callback:

- (void)tappedTextView:(UITapGestureRecognizer *)tapGesture {
    if (tapGesture.state != UIGestureRecognizerStateEnded) {
        return;
    }

    UITextView *textView = (UITextView *)tapGesture.view;
    CGPoint tapLocation = [tapGesture locationInView:textView];
    UITextPosition *textPosition = [textView closestPositionToPoint:tapLocation];
    NSDictionary *attributes = [textView textStylingAtPosition:textPosition inDirection:UITextStorageDirectionForward];

    NSURL *url = attributes[NSLinkAttributeName];

    if (url) {
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:url];
    }
}

And swift version:

Tap recognizer:

let tapRecognizer = UITapGestureRecognizer(target: self, action: Selector("tappedTextView:"))
myTextView.addGestureRecognizer(tapRecognizer)
myTextView.selectable = true

Callback:

func tappedTextView(tapGesture: UIGestureRecognizer) {

        let textView = tapGesture.view as! UITextView
        let tapLocation = tapGesture.locationInView(textView)
        let textPosition = textView.closestPositionToPoint(tapLocation)
        let attr: NSDictionary = textView.textStylingAtPosition(textPosition, inDirection: UITextStorageDirection.Forward)

        if let url: NSURL = attr[NSLinkAttributeName] as? NSURL {
            UIApplication.sharedApplication().openURL(url)
        }

        }