iPhone 8’s Home Button Area Functionality Revealed

With the iPhone 8, Apple will finally be ditching the physical home button that has been pretty much an iPhone staple ever since the phone was announced. So the question is how will Apple handle the lack of a home button? Presumably it will be replaced with a virtual one, and now thanks to developer Steve Troughton-Smith, some details on how it works have been revealed.

According to Troughton-Smith, some details about the virtual home button on the iPhone 8 includes how it can be resized. This means that it could adapt itself according to the app being used at the moment, and become bigger or smaller depending on the app’s need for the screen’s real estate.

Its indicator can also be hidden meaning that apps running in full-screen won’t have a virtual home button to distract users with. It has also been suggested that tab bars could extend underneath the virtual home button, and at the moment there doesn’t seem to be an API to allow the virtual home button’s color to be changed, which we guess is pretty much in line with Apple’s desire for uniformity.

There is no mention of whether or not there will be fingerprint scanning features associated with the virtual home button, which once again “confirms” reports that Apple might have given up trying to embed a fingerprint scanner under the phone’s display.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones, Rumors
Tags: iPhone, iPhone 8