It only registers when you touch it with your hand. Not with inanimate objects.
In: Technology
Electrical conductivity.
Imagine a grid of tiny squares with current and anything that can conduct/interferes creates a detectable signal.
This is why regular gloves don’t work but special touch screen gloves with conductive fabric on the fingers do.
It detects contact by any things with similar electrical conductivity (technically it’s actually *capacitance*) to a finger. Contrary to your claim in the post, some inanimate objects DO work. Think of styluses for example. Electrical insulators like a piece of wood don’t work because they’re not conductive. But other materials do. Anything with similar conductivitycapacitance to a finger. That’s why raindrops on the screen can wreak havoc too.
Imagine your phone screen as thousands of tiny dots. Whenever electricity touches those dots, the phone picks this up. If you touch the dots with something that is not electric, the phone won’t pick this up. Luckily, your fingers have a tiny amount of electricity which allows this to happen with your fingers
BTW old resistive touch screens that were popular before the first iPhone came out worked by pressing a thin film that was over the screen so they make contact, so they worked with any pointy thing, and plastic styluses were way better for them than fingers
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