The mobile industry is not exactly known for the longevity of its design elements. After all, new developments and innovations are popping up all the time, making things bigger, faster, smaller, thinner, or whatever happens to be desired by that particular element.
Then there's the home button on iPhones. This represents quite possibly the oldest, most persistent design element in mobile. It's the grandfather of smartphone controls. While others have tried physical buttons, capacitive buttons, soft keys, you name it, the home button persists. I have to wonder if maybe it's time to put this feature out to pasture.
The footprint of the iPhone 6 plus is the same as the Galaxy Note 4, the Alacatel Pop Mega, and other 6-inch monster phones. I have had this conversation more times than I can count:
“How big is the iPhone 6 plus?”
Handing them the Pop Mega, “It's the same size as this.”
“Whoa! How big is this screen?”
“Six inches.”
“I didn't think the iPhone 6 had a six inch screen!”
“It doesn't. It's only 5.5 inches.”
“Wait.”
“Yeah.”
It's always something like that. The reason the iPhone 6 plus is as large as other 6-inch phones is because of that half inch of real estate that the home button takes up at the bottom of the screen. That's just too much bezel by almost any definition. Further, it's a lot of wasted space. Roughly 75% of the area at the bottom of the screen is unbroken (insert build material from over the years here) to make up for that one button.
And speaking of wasted space, the iPhone now contains a Reachability feature, which seems to imply that Apple recognized that the top of the phone was too darn far away from the rest of the hand. Well, we just talked about a whole bunch of wasted space at the bottom of the phone. This is not exactly outside the box thinking here. If Apple is changing the design of its phones, by making them huge, then maybe other changes are becoming necessary.
Further, one of the more common complaints about the iPhone is that it's rather stale. That can refer to the OS itself and the design of the iPhone. It's always a rounded rectangle with a circular button at the bottom. Variety, thy bane is iPhone.
And yet…
Couldn't calling the design “stale” also mean that it's iconic, or at the very least recognizable (though not “classic” apparently). That home button is practically Apple's signature. Just a single glance at the face of a phone will allow you to determine whether it's an iPhone or not. This is not untrue for other brands, most notably the HTC One (both M7 and M8), but it's easy to see the home button as the one defining characteristic of the iPhone brand.
Plus let's not forget one of the more recent additions to the iPhone – TouchID. TouchID absolutely requires the space of a home button in order to function, lest Apple resort to a swipe type of situation, like Samsung. I think our reviews have shown that would not be a favorable change, so what's an Apple to do? Sure this home button takes up a lot of space at the bottom of a phone that is increasing in size, but TouchID is a pretty integral part of the iPhone and Apple's new payment system, Apple Pay.
Could this be averted with a PIN? Sure. But TouchID was a pretty good step forward in technology, and it'd be a shame to see that take a step back. So if the home button is to be removed, the TouchID sensor would need to be relocated. I'm not so sure I can see Apple making that much of a change to the iPhone.
Perhaps if that space at the bottom of the phone could be utilized in some way, it might soften the blow. Can you say front firing speakers? Perhaps a capacitive gesture area, since practically everything else from webOS has been redone? That could bring a meaningful gesture area back to the mobile space, and one for which I'd be thankful.
So what do you think? Is the home button getting a little too long in the tooth for you? Or do you think that if it ain't broke, Apple shouldn't fix it? Let's hear it down below and let's see if we can figure this out.
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