So, back in 2017, when the iPhone X was released, we saw that they had dropped the home button in favour of what is called gesture-based navigation.
Since then, they’ve still in lower-cost iPhones like the iPhone 8, 8 Plus and the SE but clearly, that meant that the home button days were numbered.
It was not long after that became a reality.
Nowadays, Apple has totally done away with the home buttons.
This has got a lot of people confused and some even uncomfortable. In this article, we will talk about the reason behind this change.
Why did Apple remove the home button?
For the sake of this article, we would discuss the main reason that necessitated the removal of the home button from the iPhone.
The big reason for the removal of the home button was space. The bezels on the top and bottom of the iPhone 7 were not only becoming an eyesore since Apple’s competitions at the time had thinner bezels but because it also limited the size of the iPhone’s display.
If there was a home button, there has to be a bezel and if there was a bezel, that meant there wouldn’t be an edge-to-edge display with the kind of impression screen-to-body ratio that other Android phones were providing.
So, by removing that limitation, Apple was able to push the iPhone X’s display all the way to the edge without substantially increasing the overall size of the device.
Removing the home button didn’t only allow for more screen space, but it also freed more space internally.
Primarily because of the smaller Haptic Engine, which was no longer responsible for simulation the non-mechanical home button’s click.
This also made the room for the creation of gesture-based navigation which happens to be another upgrade that became necessary.