Hello everyone. I wanted to create this thread to maybe help others with this problem. My home button on my iPhone 3g simple stopped working, and after many hours of searching online for answers, the only real advice I could find was to take it back... so I did, here's what I found. Hopefully, this can help anyone searching for this topic.
I brought the phone to the apple store and was told I would receive a replacement due to hardware malfunction, except one of the water sensors (the one in the bottom plug in) was red, effectively voiding my entire warranty. I was not happy, I had never gotten my phone wet, and the water sensor is very easy to see, one single rain drop could set it off, even if it causes no damage to the phone.
So I had a half functional phone, and no warranty. I decided to open it up and see if there was anything obvious inside, after all, what did I have to loose? Once I split the phone in two and separated the two halves, I looked around for a long time before noticing a small piece of metal laying inside. It took me a while to figure out where it came from. Below are pictures of the piece I found. The picture you are looking at is near the backside of the home button, the two small contacts are like little springs that, when the two halves of the phone come together, make contact with a circuit board on the other side, for the home button to function.
Obviously without this little spring in place, there is no contact with the other side and the home button will not work. Here it is on my finger to show you how small it is.
So there you have it. Water damage? Not a chance... And I am not rough with my phone, it is in pristine condition. I found many people online with the same issues. This is obviously a weak point in the design, and I am not the first. I was lucky enough to spot the little piece, its so small it could have easily found its way out the bottom port.
I did fix the phone, so anyone searching for info about this issue if you're in the same boat as me, can see the pics below for how I did it.
So if your comfortable using a soldering iron, and have steady hands, just make a small "chocolate chip" of solder on the broken contact, and then use a pair of very small cutters to trim it down to size to match the height of the missing spring contact. It will work perfectly.
By the way, last apple product I ever purchase. Apple disappointed me big time with this situation. I feel their zero tolerance policy on the water sensors is completely ridiculous. They are far too easy to get even the slightest moisture on them. There are a total of 4 water sensors inside the phone, and the remaining 3 were not triggered, and as you can see there was no moisture whatsoever inside the bottom of the phone where that sensor was triggered, it was actually very clean other than some dust.
Thanks for reading!
I brought the phone to the apple store and was told I would receive a replacement due to hardware malfunction, except one of the water sensors (the one in the bottom plug in) was red, effectively voiding my entire warranty. I was not happy, I had never gotten my phone wet, and the water sensor is very easy to see, one single rain drop could set it off, even if it causes no damage to the phone.
So I had a half functional phone, and no warranty. I decided to open it up and see if there was anything obvious inside, after all, what did I have to loose? Once I split the phone in two and separated the two halves, I looked around for a long time before noticing a small piece of metal laying inside. It took me a while to figure out where it came from. Below are pictures of the piece I found. The picture you are looking at is near the backside of the home button, the two small contacts are like little springs that, when the two halves of the phone come together, make contact with a circuit board on the other side, for the home button to function.
Obviously without this little spring in place, there is no contact with the other side and the home button will not work. Here it is on my finger to show you how small it is.
So there you have it. Water damage? Not a chance... And I am not rough with my phone, it is in pristine condition. I found many people online with the same issues. This is obviously a weak point in the design, and I am not the first. I was lucky enough to spot the little piece, its so small it could have easily found its way out the bottom port.
I did fix the phone, so anyone searching for info about this issue if you're in the same boat as me, can see the pics below for how I did it.
So if your comfortable using a soldering iron, and have steady hands, just make a small "chocolate chip" of solder on the broken contact, and then use a pair of very small cutters to trim it down to size to match the height of the missing spring contact. It will work perfectly.
By the way, last apple product I ever purchase. Apple disappointed me big time with this situation. I feel their zero tolerance policy on the water sensors is completely ridiculous. They are far too easy to get even the slightest moisture on them. There are a total of 4 water sensors inside the phone, and the remaining 3 were not triggered, and as you can see there was no moisture whatsoever inside the bottom of the phone where that sensor was triggered, it was actually very clean other than some dust.
Thanks for reading!
You should see the one where I stripped the 'black' off the back of the digitizer. Looks insane.