What could be worse than a broken iPhone Home button? For certain iPhone models, especially iPhone 4 and some recent iPhones, users have raise concerns about not being able to get the Home button to respond. In fact, they have to press it really hard to get a response, but sometimes even that doesn’t work.
Could your iPhone’s Home button be broken or is it just not working as it should? We checked out some of the troubleshooting steps that can help fix this problem and here’s our list of solutions.
How to fix a broken iPhone Home button
iPhone Home buttons tend to get issues usually after a year or so when the warranty expires. If your phone is out of warranty or hard to repair, you can fix the broken iPhone home button using a hardware repair or software workaround.
Apple can repair the hardware but it may be the same cost as buying an entirely new iPhone. If this is expensive or impractical for you, there’s a workaround within ios that you can use to resolve the problem.
Hardware repair
This involves a full repair of the iPhone. If the problem showed up after your iPhone dropped in water, for instance, the warranty won’t be valid. You can check with Apple if you’re still covered or how much you’re likely to pay for the repair costs.
Apple acknowledges some frequently occurring problems if there’s a widespread and legitimate issue, after which they institute a free repair program. On the iPhone 5, the power button was malfunction-prone and Apple gave free replacements or repairs for affected devices.
For the iPhone Home button issue, though, Apple hasn’t set up any repair program, and this may not change in future as more recent iPhone models don’t seem to have the problem. You could try repairing the device on your own, but we don’t recommend it because it could get worse or invalidate your warranty altogether.
Software workaround
iOS has a built-in feature that can help when your iPhone’s home button stops working. In order to activate the feature, take these steps:
- Open Settings>General>Accessibility
- Scroll down to Interaction
- Tap AssistiveTouch and tap the button next to it to turn it green
In older versions of ios, the process is slightly different, for example, for ios 6, you go to Settings>General>Accessibility and then go to Physical & Motor and click AssistiveTouch and slide it to ON.
You’ll see a small circle in a square that you can drag around the screen to the least disruptive spot. When pressed, it becomes opaque and then transparent if you leave it for a while. If you tap it though, it’ll bring up six options including Home, Custom, Siri, Device, Notification Centre and Control Centre. Between these options, you should find other buttons that can let you accomplish anything you use the Home button for.
In older IOS versions, a single button press would bring up Voice Control, Home and Favorites. Since iPhone 7 and 7 Plus doesn’t have a physical Home button, you can still get malfunctions on the button.
The good thing is that Apple’s fail-safe option will notify you to use an on-screen Home button before going for repair or service.
Elsie is a tech writer with 8+ years professional experience. For Tech News Watch, she brings rich experience contributing to topics such as Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS among others. In her spare time, she loves checking out the latest tech trends, gadgets, and news, listening to music and cars.
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