Why You Won’t Miss the Home Button on the iPhone X (Video)

One of the biggest complaints, I’ve seen online about the iPhone X (besides the loss of TouchID) is the fact people are angry about having to learn how to navigate iOS without a home button.

Instead of the home button and normal swiping up to get to control center, down to get notifications, etc. things have been swapped around.

All of this, of course, begs the question: what’s even real anymore?!

Don’t panic though, turns out the notorious gesture system is actually pretty intuitive and didn’t take me long to get the hang of. Let me show you what I mean.

Firstly, swiping down does still bring your notification shade down, but it will only do so from the left side to the beginning of the right gap.

Swiping down in that right gap, where the signal and battery icon are will instead bring down the control center (what was originally brought up by swiping up from off the bottom of the screen).

Swiping up from the bottom of the screen now brings you home.

To do this you need to swipe up from the small line that is now at the bottom of the screen (or from where it would be on the home screen, basically the edge of the phone).

To get to multitasking, most people I’ve seen swipe up in the same motion to go home but hold it down in the middle to get the cards to appear. While this does work, there’s actually a faster way.

Instead of swiping to the middle from the bottom, you can swipe off to the right of the screen to get it to immediately open the multitasking view.

There’s also a new quick switching gesture. Simply swipe to the right along the bottom of the screen to slide into the last app or swipe to the left to get to the next app you used after it.

In addition to the gestures, the button functions have been scrambled a little, again thanks to a missing home button.

Firstly, to turn off the device you now have to hold down the Sleep/Wake button and one of the volume buttons together.

If you hold down the Sleep/Wake button on the iPhone X, you’ll actually get Siri instead.

One of the cool benefits of this though is that Siri works more like a walkie-talkie in that she only listens as you have the button held down.

That’s good because it means you can have Siri listen only when you’re speaking and cut it off when you’re done, this allows Siri to not gather other noise around you and make it easier for her to figure out what you actually said.

To take a screenshot now, instead of home and sleep/wake, you can hold down the volume up and sleep/wake for a second until the screenshot appears in the corner of the screen.

Lastly, you can double-tap the Sleep/Wake button to get Apple Pay to launch. If you have Face ID setup, it’ll recognize you and you can just place your phone against a reader and you’re all set.

And there you go, hope that helped some of you. Let me know if you have any other tips in the comments below and, as always, thanks for reading.