Iphone Home Button Not Working? – How to Fix It?

iPhone home button not working? Well, don’t worry. Quite a lot of people have the very same problem. Something seems to go wrong and both the single and the double-click functionality of the home button seems to be totally lost. When this happens first, one is easily prompted to press harder. Sometimes people just thing it’s the hardware problem and that the home button is gone for good. This may not be the case most of the times.

The problem might occur because of two reasons – one, the software may be faulty and two – this is the worst case scenario – the hardware might be faulty. If it is the latter, you definitely need to go to the Apple Center and get a new iPhone. If the problem is with the software – which it mostly is – one needs to try out the following methods.

A problem with the software usually is set right when you do a restoration of the iPhone OS. You can either do a restore from the backup, or do a complete restore in case you have not much data to worry about. Restoring from the backup or from scratch lets you reconfigure all your software settings so that whatever it is that was bugging the home button on the iPhone would go away.

However, some people have reported that both the types of restore does not bring the intended results. In that case, you’ll need to follow some other method. Here’s one more method which seems to work in favor of some iPhones. You could try it too.

1. Open any application on the iPhone
2. Press and hold the Power button till the ‘Slide to Shutdown’ screen appears.
3. Now release the Power button and gently hold the Home button.
4. In all probability, your Home button would start functioning normally again!

In the case that it fails to do so even after all this, you’ll definitely need to check out the hardware part. If you have just recently bought the device, then you get a replacement warranty so you can make use of that to get a new device quickly.

Update

In case your iPhone home button has become less sensitive or is even broken, iOS 5 has come up with the great solution named ‘AssistiveTouch’ feature. Assistive Touch is one of the accessibility features in iOS 5 that can be served as a workaround, if your iPhone home button is broken.
How to Enable Assistive Touch to Access Home Button from Screen in iOS 5:
Got to Settings -> General -> Accessibility. Scroll down to bottom and tap on “AssistiveTouch” option. Set it ON to activate the option.

After setting AssistiveTouch to ON, you will see a transparent round button at the bottom right of the screen. Tap on that round button to bring the touch menu.

You will find the Home button option that works just like as the physical home button.

Hope, latest iOS 5 AssistiveTouch feature will bring the intended results.