What to Do If Your IPhone’s Home Button Is Broken
A few years ago, when the Home button on my iPhone broke, I turned on the on-screen button instead. It wasn’t the best way to use the phone, but I traveled a lot at the time and didn’t really have time to visit the Apple Store to get it fixed.
In iOS, Apple has an AssistiveTouch feature that places the Home button on your phone’s display. It is for people who have problems with button presses, but it also comes in handy when you manage to break those buttons (which I think is causing button clicking problems in some way).
When it’s on, you will have a Home button on the side of your phone display. Clicking on it will give you access to some of the iPhone’s features. What you see there can be customized to suit your needs, but you can add things like Siri and volume controls or a shortcut to take a screenshot (so you don’t have to press that weird home button and volume button at the same time) …
You can access it by going to the Settings menu on your phone, then General, then Accessibility, and then Assistive Touch. From there, you’ll want to enable this feature (you can disable it in the same way). You customize what’s there by choosing Customize Top-Level Menu from the menu.
ZDNet recently posted a post that suggested taking AssistiveTouch a step further and using it as a context menu for some of your iPhone’s hidden features. At the time I was reading it, I thought this idea was a bit absurd, but there are actually scenarios in which it makes sense.
This weekend I was chatting with a friend who has a phone at some other Otterbox store. Since she often breaks phone screens, she likes to keep them on, but the reinforced buttons on the side make it difficult to access things like the volume button. She mentioned how painful it was to use the buttons on her phone in the case, and I pointed to AssistiveTouch, which quickly changed the game. This is not the use case I thought about before, but it’s great.
AssistiveTouch is certainly not a feature everyone needs, but if you have a heavy-duty case (or a broken button or two) then it could be a solid feature (literally) in your back pocket.