The New Home Button on the iPhone 5 (Allegedly)

I was suspicious of the mocked-up design of the new iPhone 5 as seen on This Is My Next back in April, but recent rumors are making it hard to ignore. While several of the design changes are somewhat expected (thinner body, tapered edges, etc.), the new home button is utterly fascinating. 

Above image from This is My Next

This Is My Next describes the button as such: “the home button is doing double duty as a gesture area; this falls in line with testing we’ve seen for gestures on the iPad, and our sources say that gestures are definitely coming in a future version of iOS. The home button will likely be enlarged, but not scrapped altogether”.

John Gruber and Dan Benjamin briefly speculated on what a gesture sensitive button could be used for in iOS on the most recent episode of The Talk Show. Would it behave like the nub ball on Blackberries, used for scrolling? Likely not. What about the Palm Pre, where the gesture area can be used as a back button, with a right-to-left swipe? Again, probably not. 

I believe that if this new gesture region is in fact coming to the iPhone, it will be used for only one thing: switching between open apps. We can all agree that the current multitasking solution (double clicking the home button and then tapping the respective app) could stand to be improved. A left-to-right swipe would transition to the previously used app, while a right-to-left swipe would move the other way in the app history. This new gesture area would essentially mimic the function of the 4-fingered app switching gesture as seen in the iPad, which is cumbersome to perform on the iPad and nearly impossible to do on the iPhone. 

Some may argue that this gesture region could be used for other things as well. Swiping through the home screens, for example, or flicking through photos. Allowing that functionality would be a mistake. The key to iOS lies in its direct manipulation of objects on the screen. To page through photos, you literally touch the photo and slide it off the screen. Having a gesture region that performs this task would move further away from this feeling of direct manipulation.

The home button is special. In it’s purest form, it is not used to manipulate what is happening on the screen, but to manipulate the apps themselves (in most cases, closing them and returning to the home screen). Tying the gesture area to the home button makes sense; app switching is a “top level” function, in the same way that closing apps is. 

Porting the gesture region to the iPad would be tricky, namely because the device does not have a default orientation. The app switching functionality is already on the iPad (via the aforementioned 4-fingered swipe) but a gesture region would make that easier. I’m sure Apple will figure it out.