New iPhone X Gestures To Replace the Home Button

Using the iPhone X means learning a set of new gestures to replace the Home button. You need to learn how to do a quick and short swipe up at the bottom of the screen to replace the basic Home button press. Other functions, like screenshots, Siri, accessibility and restarting your phone will use the side button and a combination of other techniques.

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Video Transcript: So there are a bunch of new gestures that come with using an iPhone X and that's because there's no Home button. So a lot of things you did with the Home button you now have to do in other ways. 
I'm going to raise the iPhone and it wakes up. You can see the padlock at the top unlocks saying that it recognizes my face. Now it tell me to swipe to open at the bottom. So a quick, and I mean a really quick little swipe barely moving my thumb up at all, takes me to the Home screen. That's the equivalent to pressing the Home button. Just this little quick swipe up right where the Home button used to be. So it's kind of natural to learn it. 
Now there's a bunch of other things. If you want to go and say you're in an app and you want to leave the app of course there's no Home button to do that. Use that same quick swipe up motion. Now notice there's a little white bar at the bottom of the screen. It's there to kind of be an indicator of where this swipe happens. So just a little quick swipe up and I get back to the Home screen. 
Now if I want to go to the App switcher, the way I do that is I do the swipe up but I pause at the top. I don't release my thumb. So swipe up and wait. Now you can see I've entered the mode where I can switch between apps and I can quit apps. I can still use the quick swipe up even there even though there's not a little white line there to go Home.  So that's how you get to the Home button. 
You still have the ability to swipe down from the top either the middle or the left to get Notifications but you can also swipe down from the top right corner to get to Control Center. So those are the basics. But there's actually a lot more.
So in addition to the raise to wake feature you can also wake up the phone by simply tapping on the screen. Another way to do it is to use the side button. You just press that. If you've got the new leather folio which kind of works like the smart case for the iPad opening that will automatically  switch the phone on. Then do the face ID thing. 
Now there's another way to switch between apps. So if I go into an app and I've got that line there at the bottom, called the Home Indicator, I can actually go left or right across the bottom and I can do back and forth between different apps. So you can switch apps pretty easily like that without having to go back to the Home screen. 
Now how about Siri because you don't have the Home button for Siri. Well, you can use the side button for that. The side button is actually larger on the iPhone X and it's easy to press and hold that to activate Siri. You can also say, of course, Hey Siri. 
Now authenticating with Apple Pay works with the side button as well. When I've held up my iPhone X to a pay terminal I get a little indicator next to the side button on the screen that says to press that twice. I pressed that twice and then it authenticates with face ID. It's also great to see that face ID completely replaces touch ID even in apps that haven't updated. So I have a couple of apps that still think about touch ID but face ID just seamlessly goes in there and works fine to replace it and I can actually authenticate with those apps even though those apps haven't been updated yet. I'm not sure if that's true with all apps but at least the ones I've tried it's worked. 
How about a screen shot? So for a screen shot, of course, you don't have the Home button so you can't press the side button and the Home button. So the way to do a screen shot now is you do the side button and the volume up. So I press both of those and it takes a screen shot. You can see the new OS 11 screen shot functionality at the bottom left. Interestingly enough in screen shot the notch at the top of the screen isn't there. Actually you see whatever would be hidden by the notch.
You may also wonder if you want to delete an app. So let's tap and hold on an app and I get the wiggle mode with all of the little x's there. Now typically to exit this you would press the Home button. But there's no Home button. But notice at the top right corner is a new item there. A Done button. Press the Done button when you're done deleting apps or moving them around. 
Now the absence of the Home button also effects a lot of accessibility features. So if we go into Settings and then General and then Accessibility we can see several things here. Some of the things I've mentioned actually have On/Off switches in here. So you may want to go look through these if something is not working for you. You can also look for things like Reachability. So Reachability is a feature for the larger screen iPhones to be able to bring things down from the top so you can reach them when you're holding the phone with one hand. So turn that On. Now you can swipe down on the bottom edge of the screen to bring items in reach instead of using the Home button for that. 
Also you've got down here at the bottom things for the Accessibility shortcut. Triple clicking the side button now not the Home button and you can determine what happens and in what order things are in here. So you want to definitely check those out if you have a new iPhone X.
Now if you want to turn off your iPhone what you want to do is hold the side button and either volume button and just keep holding it until you get the screen that asks you if you want to turn things off. So you get this here. Now I can actually slide to power off or go into one of the emergency modes or cancel. In addition to that if you want to actually reset the phone there's a little, it's kind of like a game code, you have to press and release the volume up button and then press and release the volume down button and then hold the side button for ten seconds and it should do like a forced restart. So this is if you run into trouble and your phone is stuck, it's locked, that combination should restart it.

Comments: 6 Responses to “New iPhone X Gestures To Replace the Home Button”

George

7 years ago

Gary, noticed in last video that your screen didn’t show the notch. Is that normal, or did you do some magic?

Gary Rosenzweig

George: The notch is physical. When you take screen grabs or video capture, you don't see it in the digital representation.

Joe De Young

Is it possible to use Face ID to always open the phone to the home screen instead of the last opened screen or app?

Bonnie Mangold

Do you expect cases with a lower lip interfere with the up swipe (that replaces the home button?)

Bonnie: Possibly. Hopefully those making cases for the iPhone X will design appropriately.

Joe: Face ID just unlocks the phone, so it will always just be as you left it.

Comments Closed.

New iPhone X Gestures To Replace the Home Button

Comments: 6 Responses to “New iPhone X Gestures To Replace the Home Button”

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