@TheDJ good point, I thought about this before :(

we need bigger tap area and tap highlight for these buttons. the button in html/css and uses 6px padding around to create a big hit area. also when you tap on it we turn the background gray.

the only alternative i can think of to align this -

• keep padding on left, top and bottom to have bigger tap area (use right padding for RTL)
• dont use background color to show tap highlight feedback
• tint the pencil (blue/yellow) itself to highlight on touchstart

^ What do you think of this?

I mostly think that most users will never be able to see any highlight during tap to begin with, unless they hit the edges of the button, or have tiny fingers.
This is also one of the reasons on touch devices that it is so important to make the button take 'some' sort of effect immediately after hitting a button. This in order to make sure that users experience that the pressing of the button was successful and is doing something.

Option 1 seems fine in that for most people, the visibility of the background highlight is so minute, they will hardly notice it is on one side.
Option 3 will hardly be visible, but I actually think that might be an interesting to idea to explore if you keep it highlighted after the tap, instead of just during the tap; 'You have touched this button and this action is now "active". '

@TheDJ sorry about the confusion. they weren't three different option. that's all part of one solution :)

three bullet points to solve this problem.

@TheDJ nevermind, found a solution and i put a patch to fix

https://github.com/wikimedia/wikipedia-ios/pull/445