The home button on my wife’s iPhone 5 was unresponsive on Sunday. She would click it and nothing would happen. The lock/power button was still working along with the other buttons like volume up/down and the silence switch. I’ve never had this happen to any iOS devices I have owned.
What do you do without a home button? It’s the one unchanged button on every iPhone ever produced. It also has so many features tied to it like closing an app, multitasking, Siri, etc… It’s definitely something you forget about using once it becomes muscle memory. The only thing I can compare it to is breaking your thumb and having a cast on. Try opening a door without your thumb.
I double dog dare you.
She was getting annoyed having to turn the device completely off in order to switch apps. That’s when I dusted off my old Apple Store specialist hat and remembered Accessibility. The iPhone is seriously the most accessible mobile device out there and iOS has so many accessible features in the operating system.
Enter: Assistive Touch.
Assistive Touch will basically put a little floating, virtual home button on your device. You can move it around the screen to wherever you want. Here’s how to activate it:
Once you click it, you will get a number of features to use. Look! A home button! There’s other quick access things like Siri, Favorites and Device. Here’s some screenshots of all the features:
This story has a happy ending though. I took it into my local Apple Store last night. On my way into the store, not making this up, it started working again. I still had a genius take a look at it and note that we had issues with it. In any case of something with you Apple devices, take it to the Genius Bar and get those events catalogued. It always good to build up that history, it can help build the case for a replacement device someday.
Any weird Apple product stories you can share?
I had a similar problem with my iPhone 4—not that it was “sticking,” but that it wouldn’t work 75% of the time. Very frustrating. I then set up assistive touch, and it was a great work around—my phone was only slightly annoying then. But, it did get me through until the 5 came out.
Interestingly, after getting the 5 we talked with a 3rd party iPhone “fixer” who said that they could have replaced or repaired it for a fraction of what the Apple Store said they could. If it happens again—and I hope it doesn’t—I’d talk to a 3rd party vendor.
Thanks!
Thanks for the heads up. Hopefully it won’t come to that. There is definitely a difference in tactile feeling with the Home button between the iPhone 4/4s and 5.
So if you have Assistive Touch on, is that black box always on screen? I’m guessing not, since two of your screenshots don’t have it, but how do you bring up the black box/buttons again?
The black box only comes up when you click on the virtual home button.