A really beautiful concept, and the idea of having a dynamic home button area to accommodate additional buttons/functionality is clever. However, as others have pointed out, this approach would result in some screen estate wastage. There is also a question about how a virtual home button, occurring throughout the OS, could be accommodated in the case of a user watching a full screen video.
I wonder if moving away from the concept of a home button all together (either a physical or a virtual home button) could be another option. One way of doing this could be to tweak the feature Apple first implemented with the 6S, whereby force touching the edge of the phone brings up the app selection panel. There could be an extra gesture tacked on to this that provides an option to go straight into the home screen (rather than the app selection panel). For example, you could force touch the edge of the phone with your thumb (which would bring up the app selection panel as normal) and then immediately slide your thumb downwards to go straight into the home screen. That actually sounds clunkier than it physically feels (although i'm sure that it's not the most efficient method). The value with this approach is that it would minimise the screen estate wastage associated with permanently displaying a virtual home button in every app.
That said, I would actually be happy if Apple chose to implement your concept. It's a really fantastic effort. And the screen estate lost from permanently displaying a virtual home button would be at least partially offset by the larger overall size of the display in your concept.
I wonder if moving away from the concept of a home button all together (either a physical or a virtual home button) could be another option. One way of doing this could be to tweak the feature Apple first implemented with the 6S, whereby force touching the edge of the phone brings up the app selection panel. There could be an extra gesture tacked on to this that provides an option to go straight into the home screen (rather than the app selection panel). For example, you could force touch the edge of the phone with your thumb (which would bring up the app selection panel as normal) and then immediately slide your thumb downwards to go straight into the home screen. That actually sounds clunkier than it physically feels (although i'm sure that it's not the most efficient method). The value with this approach is that it would minimise the screen estate wastage associated with permanently displaying a virtual home button in every app.
That said, I would actually be happy if Apple chose to implement your concept. It's a really fantastic effort. And the screen estate lost from permanently displaying a virtual home button would be at least partially offset by the larger overall size of the display in your concept.
Last edited:
