How to Add Soft Home Button on iPhone Screen?

iPhone 8 and older models used to have a physical home button. The button was used for unlocking with Touch ID (fingerprint) and for various other purposes. However, Apple remove the home button on iPhone X models due to full screen usage. If you are missing the home button, fortunately you can add a soft home button on iPhone screen which can be used for quick navigations. Also check out how to use the back side of iPhone as your home button.

Add Soft Home Button in iPhone

• Open Settings app and then go to “Accessibility” section.
• Tap on “Touch” option under “Physical and Motor” section.

• Tap “AssistiveTouch” option and then turn the switch against “AssistiveTouch” option on the next screen.

• This will show a soft home screen button which you can drag and drop on any convenient place on the screen.
• Tap on the AssistiveTouch button and select “Home” option to view your home screen.

Customizing Buttons in Assistive Touch

As you can see, the soft home button has bunch of menu items in addition to going to home screen. By default, iPhone will show 6 items and some of them will also show additional options. You can show up to 8 menu items and customize the list as per your preferences. Here, let me show with the “Screenshot” menu in soft home button. By default, you need to tap on the soft home button and then go to “Device > More > Screenshot” to capture your screen.

Let me add the Screenshot menu in first screen so that you can easily access without navigating to three screens. Also, keep only 6 items in the first screen and remove all other additional options.

• Go to “Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch” section.
• Tap on “Customize Top Level Menu” option.
• Here, you will see default set of items showing when tapping on the soft home button.

• Tap on the + or – icons to add or reduce the number of items.
• For replacing an existing menu, simply tap on it to view a huge list of options.
• Select an item from the list to replace the menu in soft button.
• I will tap on “Device” option and replace it with “Screenshot” item.

• Similarly, I will replace “Custom” item with “Mute”.
• With this, the soft button will have 6 menu items and all will be shown in a single screen.

If you do not want to use the current setup, any time go back to AssistiveTouch customizing section and tap on “Reset…” link. This will reset the soft home button to show default 6 menu items.

Tapping Actions for Home Button

By default, single time tapping on the soft home button will reveal the menu items and double tapping or long press will not trigger any action. You can change this and customize the tapping actions on the soft home button for single tap, double tap and long press.

• Go to “Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch” section.
• Under “Custom Actions” section, you can see “Single-Tap” is set as “Open Menu”.
• If you want to get rid of all additional menu items and use the Assistive Touch button as your home button then tap on “Single-Tap” option.

• Select “Home” item from the huge list of options and tap “Done”.

Now, you can tap on the Assistive Touch button to go to home screen without seeing additional menu items. Personally, I do not recommend this as the menu items are useful to do your favorite actions quickly. So, leave the single tap as “Open Menu” and set a custom action for double tap (example – App Switcher) and long press (example – Screenshot) as you need.

Other Soft Button Options

On the “AssistiveTouch” settings page, scroll down to bottom and turn on “Confirm with AssistiveTouch” option under “Side Button Confirmation” section. This will allow you to pay with Face ID using the soft home button instead of double pressing the side button.

Custom gesture is one more option to use in the soft button. Select “Custom” menu item after tapping on the soft home button (in default setup). Then tap on one of the + icons.

This will open a recording screen for capturing your custom gesture. Create your gesture and tap on “Stop” link showing on the bottom right corner.

Tap on “Save” link showing on top right corner and provide a name for your gesture.

You can see the custom gesture appears in the soft button’s menu (after tapping on Custom menu) and start using it when needed. You can also see the gesture in AssistiveTouch settings page.

Final Words

The soft home button added in iPhone with Assistive Touch is much more than the simple home button. You can customize the menu items and add custom gestures to make the more out of it.