iPhone 8 To Launch With Secret Home Button, After All

The iPhone 8 rumor mill is in full bloom. Each day we get a new insight on how the iPhone 8 will look like and what will the new functionalities entail. The latest suggests that the home button will make a return, only not in the way that you imagine… #mobilemagic

Steve Troughton-Smith perused once more the HomePod firmware to find out that the Home button will appear in virtual form and therefore will automatically resize when it needs to or even hide away.

Now, before this came to the surface, KGI was reporting that at the bottom of the front screen iPhone 8 would have a function area, similar to the Touch Bar we can find on the MacBook Pro. While the code doesn’t confirm or deny that assumption, it does say that apps that use bottom tab bars will come above the home button. So, it’s clear that the rumored function area will appear somewhere near the home button, at the bottom of the display.

In this case, a fixed home button would only complicate things, which explains the company’s potential decision of allowing it to change size or disappear at times. Troughton-Smith noticed that there’s no mention of an API capable of making it change color so it’s visible on the display; therefore, engineers might have found a different way to make it pop from the background.

We know some facts re iPhone 8 home button area:

• it resizes
• indicator can be hidden
• no API to change color
• tab bars extend under it

— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) August 10, 2017

Once more, until the big Apple unveiling in September, we have to take this rumors with a pinch of salt. After all, we’re talking about a piece of code that shows what can be done rather than what was done to make the iPhone 8 reality.