Homing In On A Fix For a Brand New iPhone Without A Home Button

FEATURE – If home is where the heart is, why was mine not in it with my latest Apple smartphone?

For my birthday — which happens to fall on this very day (August 30) — as a gift to myself, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to an iPhone 15 Pro. Aside from the fact that I now have a brand new iPhone, the upside is that I will be able to experience Apple Intelligence in all of its glory but the downside is that this device does not have a Home button (which, up untill now, has been a staple on all of the iPhones that I’ve ever owned).

While the display of the iPhone 15 Pro may feature a Ceramic Shield with the thinnest borders ever seen on an Apple smartphone, one of its key features is not a Home button. (Photo: Apple, Inc.)

Now, before we proceed any further, I am fully aware that the iPhone 16 is going to be announced by Apple in a couple of weeks, however, when you can get an iPhone that retails for $999 for only $649 after trade in, you take it and run – especially when your wireless carrier is offering you $350 (specifically, in monthly bill credits over 36 months) for a two-year old phone currently valued at $95 when traded in (at retail)!

**AD:If you’re looking to upgrade your old iPhone, look no further than to the award-winning MacPrices for the best deals, latest discounts, and lowest prices on iPhones from Apple (and Apple Authorized resellers). Pricing updated daily, seven days a week!

Far From Home

Every iPhone model sold today features all-screen displays – gone is a classic characteristic of iPhones from yesteryear: the Home button (a key feature on the original iPhone from 2007that Apple first did away with on the iPhone X in 2017).

The only exception to the rule was the special edition iPhones that Apple released in 2020 and 2022, respectively, the iPhone SE (second generation) and the iPhone SE (third generation). In order to keep costs down, these two devices used an old design — that of the iPhone 8 from 2017 — and because of this, a Home button was still present.

Prior to upgrading to the iPhone 15 Pro, I had the iPhone SE (third generation) so operating a phone without a Home button was a little difficult to get used to and quite cumbersome… especially when every other iPhone model that I owned before that featured such on its display.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that the learning curve was steep but as the saying goes? You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Actions once performed with the use of the Home button such as activating the app switcher or returning to the Home Screen involved retraining myself and going back to basics.

No Way Home

One crucial function — an action previously performed with the use of the Home button — was something that I was not prepared to tackle on my brand new iPhone: unlocking the phone.

After my device was activated and all of the data from my previous phone had been transferred over, I was ready to happily walk out of the store with my iPhone 15 Pro in tow. Then, I had a sudden realization that really hit home.

Since this device did not have a Home button, how the heck was I supposed to be able to gain access to the phone?

In order to unlock an iPhone without a Home button one only needs to simply swipe up from the bottom to get past the Lock Screen. However, as someone who is completely blind and primarily uses swipes and gestures to navigate the user interface via VoiceOver — a screen reader for the visually impaired which is built in to all of Apple’s software platforms — this is easier said than done!

Much to my chagrin, no matter what technique I tried with my swipes, I was unsuccessful in unlocking the phone.

Homecoming

The initial solution to the problem was enabling an accesssibility feature called assistive touch which, in essence, placed a pseudo Home button — albeit, in virtual digital form — on the Lock Screen (this was set up for me at the store by the employee who activated my device… even they could not get the phone to unlock with a simple swipe despite them watching a video on YouTube that illustrated how to perform the action with VoiceOver enabled).

While this fix of sorts served its purpose, it was short-lived as I was keen on finding an alternate method to the madness since it wasn’t very reliable. Normally, with VoiceOver, you swipe left and/or right on the display to interact with the elements onscreen (e.g., icons or text and images) but trying to find this pseudo Home button was like searching for a needle in a haystack. That’s when I remembered an accessibility feature called back tap which allows you to perform certain actions by tapping twice (or, thrice) on the backside of the iPhone (something that Apple introduced into its mobile operating system in 2020 with iOS 14 and is compatible on all iPhones going back to the iPhone 8).

I chose to program a double tap to activate the app switcher (akin to doing the same on an iPhone that has a Home button) and a triple tap to return to the Home Screen. I also found that doing the latter would bring up the keypad for entering your passcode while on the Lock Screen, thus, providing an easier method of unlocking the phone (and, without any of the madness involved with attempting to do the same using assistive touch).

Who says you can’t go home?

So, despite initially second guessing myself for upgrading to an iPhone without the Home button of old? Thanks to back tap, I now feel much more at home with my iPhone 15 Pro and there’s no tapping, uh, I mean, looking back!.

About This Column: “mac Potpourri” is a column periodically published on MacPrices throughout the year (generally on a monthly basis) that primarily aims to take an assortment of previously published articles from around the web (e.g., Business Insider, Macworld, and Wired) containing different angles on the same subject matter with Apple, Inc. at its core — the company whose products’ prices are tracked daily on this website — which are then, in turn, combined into one single article in order to provide readers with a better sense of the main idea and/or topic of discussion being presented: hence, the word potpourri in this column’s name. (Note: sources are always cited within the article as embedded links, however, may be updated by their respective publishers and/or deleted over time).