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Why is the iPhone 4S so slow to respond to a Home-button press?

W

WilliamG

macrumors G4
Original poster
Mar 29, 2008
10,055
3,978
Seattle
I've felt that when you're in an app, e.g. Safari, and you hit the Home button, there an inordinately long pause that takes place before anything happens. It's the same when you hit the Home button when the phone is locked/off. Takes just a bit too long for the screen to come on...

I compared it to my iPad 2 running iOS 5, and the difference is pretty staggering. When in Safari in both the iPad 2 and the 4S, hitting the Home buttons on both devices simultaneously results in the iPad 2 almost fully through the close-Safari animation before the 4S even does anything.

Is this an iOS 5 issue with the iPhone 4 as well?
 
I did see some videos of people complaining about this on youtube.
They were claiming the iPhone 4S was way slower than the iPhone 4.
But I have been experiencing slow downs on the home button on my iPhone 4 with iOS 5 but only occasionally.
 
iPhone 4s home button slowness narrowed to software

I'm going to share my experience with the iPhone 4s home button slowness. I just returned home from the apple store with a iPhone 4s replacement,(old one had mushy/non tactile home button) however when I tried this replacement unit i noticed the home button was very slow to respond, (slow to wake,double tap tray, single tap to exit took a couple moments) nothing running in the backround. The software that was on it was iOS 5 preloaded from the apple store. When I restored from backup the backup I had just made a couple hours before with my previous iPhone 4s, the home button issue vanished.

I hope people can take away from this that my issue is most likley software related, so try restoring from backups before panicking.
 
Ive noticed my home button was slower when I had the triple click feature on. Make sure its off
 
There's a very slight pause when closing apps for me (probably less than half a second), but it's the exact same length as on my iPad 2 (also on iOS 5).

Everything seems normal for me.
 
I did a restore on the phone that day and it went back to normal. No idea what was wrong...
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4S: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Mine is working just fine.
 
clunkmess said:
I'm going to share my experience with the iPhone 4s home button slowness. I just returned home from the apple store with a iPhone 4s replacement,(old one had mushy/non tactile home button) however when I tried this replacement unit i noticed the home button was very slow to respond, (slow to wake,double tap tray, single tap to exit took a couple moments) nothing running in the backround. The software that was on it was iOS 5 preloaded from the apple store. When I restored from backup the backup I had just made a couple hours before with my previous iPhone 4s, the home button issue vanished.

I hope people can take away from this that my issue is most likley software related, so try restoring from backups before panicking.
Click to expand...

Lucky you. I tried that and people at Apple store wouldn't budge because the home button "worked.". They can't subjectively replace something based on how springy it should feel. It really is hit and miss with the stores and their replacement policies.
 
Just came home with a new 4S replacement. Did a side by side comparison of home button response, and it's about the same. If anything I would say the 4S is faster. I'm sure of it.
 
Slow Home Button Fixed

AndrewR23 said:
Ive noticed my home button was slower when I had the triple click feature on. Make sure its off
Click to expand...

This is definitely the problem
It fixed my slow home responding home button
I had a 4 and a 4S side-by side. The difference was noticeable. The 4 was instant, the 4S took about 1/2 sec.

Go to =>Settings =>General =>Accessibility => Triple-click Home = OFF

Thanks AndrewR
 
Try this...seems to help on iPhone 4. Unsure on 4s.

1.) Open any application
2.) Press and hold the power button until the slide to shutdown swipe bar appears.
3.) Release Power button
4.) Press and hold Home button Lightly until screen returns to icon screen
5.) Enjoy your functioning home button!!!This procedure recalibrates the home button after normal wear or heavy use.
 
tandar said:
This is definitely the problem
It fixed my slow home responding home button
I had a 4 and a 4S side-by side. The difference was noticeable. The 4 was instant, the 4S took about 1/2 sec.

Go to =>Settings =>General =>Accessibility => Triple-click Home = OFF

Thanks AndrewR
Click to expand...

Absolutely right. This was it.

2sa said:
Try this...seems to help on iPhone 4. Unsure on 4s.

1.) Open any application
2.) Press and hold the power button until the slide to shutdown swipe bar appears.
3.) Release Power button
4.) Press and hold Home button Lightly until screen returns to icon screen
5.) Enjoy your functioning home button!!!This procedure recalibrates the home button after normal wear or heavy use.
Click to expand...

Never heard of this...
 
WilliamG said:
Absolutely right. This was it.



Never heard of this...
Click to expand...

i never heard of that either. that used to be how you would kill an app before there was multi-tasking. its possible it does something. not sure that it calibrates the home button.
 
2sa said:
Try this...seems to help on iPhone 4. Unsure on 4s.

1.) Open any application
2.) Press and hold the power button until the slide to shutdown swipe bar appears.
3.) Release Power button
4.) Press and hold Home button Lightly until screen returns to icon screen
5.) Enjoy your functioning home button!!!This procedure recalibrates the home button after normal wear or heavy use.
Click to expand...

This got it....my trible click was already off. I also say a slow response on phone wake-up.
 
Hey, I had no idea about this. I had a 4, got stolen a little while back, of course decided with 4S out to get that instead of replacing 4. Obviously 4S hard to find right now, so using my old 3GS until I either give up and order online or the walk-in purchase 4S inventory greatly improves. I thought the slow home button response was just my perception, caused by switching from a 4 to a 3GS, and also upgrading that 3GS to iOS 5. Nope. Your recalibration did a trick on the 3GS: It's like a whole new phone.

2sa said:
Try this...seems to help on iPhone 4. Unsure on 4s.

1.) Open any application
2.) Press and hold the power button until the slide to shutdown swipe bar appears.
3.) Release Power button
4.) Press and hold Home button Lightly until screen returns to icon screen
5.) Enjoy your functioning home button!!!This procedure recalibrates the home button after normal wear or heavy use.
Click to expand...
 
i went to the genius bar and they gave me that whole salesmen bologna. it doesn't recalibrate anything. i had 2 genius look at my phone and both said its a software issue with ios5 and not a hardware issue and they told me to do that so i did that in the store and it that did not even work and both of them saw that and still wouldn't fix or replace it for me and i have applecare! . so how can i do a home button reset if the button doesn't even work ? i called applecare and there taking care of it. if all else fails call apple. i know its hit or miss with the apple stores but lately everywhere I've heard read or seen its really getting out of hand when someone has a legit problem with there phone. and the geniuses won't help
 
ZipZap said:
This got it....my trible click was already off. I also say a slow response on phone wake-up.
Click to expand...

you can just turn the triple-click on and then turn it off. it definitely works for me. and I don't know why either, my 4s is 64gb white. what kind of 4s you guys have ?
 
I'm having the same problem with my iPhone 4S. I've tried everything discussed here: turning triple click off, reset the phone multiple times, restored multiple times. Kind of hoping this is a software problem since it is happening to my ipad 2 running iOS 5 (although to a lesser extent).

I have noticed that if I'm listening to music and then try to wake up the iPhone there is no lag. Anyone call applecare or speak to a genius about this?
 
I'm having this same issue. Its not really a problem, its just a little annoying. I tried recalibrating the home button as someone else had suggested but that didn't work. Triple click was already off but I tried toggling it on and then off again and that didn't work either.
I have noticed that if I've been using the phone recently, the phone responds to the home button immediately. But if I wait for around a minute then I have the delay.
 
I've noticed that if the phone has been asleep for a while, pressing the Home button to wake it up takes a second for the screen to light up. If, however, you put the phone to sleep and immediately wake it up, it wakes up much more quickly.
 
iOS 5 issue not a iPhone 4S issue

C'mon guys, it's pretty obvious it's a iOS 5 issue here. Let's just hope Apple's upcoming update fixes this issue along with the batterygate issue! :rolleyes:
 
That "half-a-second" pause you are experiencing is not only a 4S issue, it is an all across iOS platform issue.
The reason why you get that short pause after you press the Home Button is due to Multitasking.
After tweaking, disabling, enabling features all throughout the phone for the past year, I have come across the fact that once Multitasking is disabled, exiting apps via Home Button is almost instantaneous. The graphical interface is much more smoother as well.
A side note, applications load slightly faster with Multitasking disabled, but, the tradeoff is that they won't stay suspended in memory.
As of iOS 5, I am no longer able to do so, because the dock becomes greyed out and unusable for some reason, so I just keep it on.
It's very weird why the phone acts in that manner because of the feature, but I'm sure anyone else who has done this can confirm as well.
 
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