For the first time since the iPhone’s debut in 2007, Apple no longer sells a smartphone with a home button. The iPhone 16E announced yesterday removes it. The removal was long overdue, having been surpassed by all touchscreen controls many years ago. But while the home button’s time is over, it leaves behind an important legacy.
The home button was crucial to the first iPhone, but it was also jarring; no other phone at that time had basically no buttons. It was both a gamble and a necessary innovation.
I went back and watched the original iPhone announcement to see how Steve Jobs pitched it. “On the front, there’s only one button down there,” Jobs said. “We call it the home button. It takes you home from wherever you are. And that’s it.” The first time he demoed it, he hopped into the iPod app and then clicked the home button to back out to the homescreen.
It immediately made sense, and it’s something anyone could understand right away. The home button made the transition to smartphones and touchscreens much easier for people: if you got lost in an app or forgot what you were doing, you could always press the home button to back out to the homescreen and reorient yourself.
Apple, of course, didn’t just use the home button to take you home. Over time, it added features like holding it down to talk to Siri on the iPhone 4S. Apple turned the button into a fingerprint sensor for Touch ID with the iPhone 5S. And with the iPhone 7, the home button technically stopped being a real button — Apple instead used the Taptic Engine to simulate the feeling of pressing a mechanical button. But even with all that functionality, you could still use the home button as the ultimate safety valve.
The home button was so good that Apple kept it basically the same for 10 years. But a lot had changed by the end of that decade: the iPhone started to look dated with its big, thick bezels, and many Android phones had moved to full-screen designs. The home button, as useful as it was, was making the iPhone appear to be behind its rivals.
With the iPhone X in 2017 — a decade after the release of the first iPhone — the company tossed the home button aside in favor of an all-screen display and a persistent bar at the bottom of the screen. I was very skeptical when Apple dropped the home button with the iPhone X; there was just no way a little floating bar could be as easy to use as a button.
Years later, I still think that’s true — but just barely. The bar works well as a thing to fall back on, and many iPhone generations on, the vast majority of people have gotten used to swiping up to get home instead of mashing a button. Some features that used to live on the home button now work just as well on the sleep / wake button. It’s nice to have the extra screen real estate without the home button on the bottom. And Face ID is arguably a better authentication system than Touch ID.
Apple probably should have fully dropped the home button a long time ago. (The company has now mostly moved on from Lightning, too.) And even if I haven’t wanted to push a home button for a while, I’ll remember it fondly now that it’s gone.