How to give your iPhone X a virtual home button (AAPL)

The iPhone X is the first iPhone to ditch the physical home button.
But there is a way to simulate a home button using the iPhone's software.
It's a bit of a hack, though, and we don't recommend it.

Apple made one big change to the iPhone X.

In an effort to make the phone's screen span edge-to-edge, Apple has eliminated the home button that has graced every other iPhone since it was invented.

Apple replaced the iPhone's functions with gestures that are fairly intuitive, but some people will still miss the original home button.

Turns out, there's a way to simulate the old home button in software, as discovered by The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern.

However, it's a bit of a hack — the software "home button replacement" covers part of the interface in most apps and it's clearly not what Apple intended users to do. It won't read your fingerprint, either.

But if you really want to try out a software home button on your iPhone X, read on:

There isn't one of these on the iPhone X.

Without a physical home button, the screen on the iPhone X covers nearly the entirety phone's front.

There's just screen where the home button used to be.

Let's create a software home button. The workaround uses a feature originally intended for people with disabilities called Assistive Touch.

More information about iPhone accessibility features from Apple can be found here.

You can turn on Assistive Touch in Settings > General > Accessibility > Assistive Touch. (Scroll down.) Assistive Touch puts a white dot on your screen that gives you quick access to common features. People have used it in the past when their iPhones had broken home buttons.

There it is!

Now you should have a white dot that you can move anywhere on your screen. We need to put it where the home button used to be, so you'll need to clear the docked icons on the bottom.

via GIPHY

It works!

There are problems with this setup, though. For instance, the virtual home button covers key parts of the user interface in certain apps, like Safari. And if it's too close to the bottom of the screen, the iPhone automatically moves the dot to the top-right corner.

It's a fun hack, but I wouldn't use it on my everyday phone. Apple's gesture to go home works well.