At the start of 2016 Apple released an iOS update that “bricked” many Apple iPhones because they’d had their home button replaced with an aftermarket one. Instead of warning the user there was an issue and giving them the opportunity to stop the update, it threw up iTunes “Error 53” and left the phone in recovery mode. After much media coverage and customer backlash, they were forced to release a patch to restore the phone’s functionality.
If the home button got broken on the iPhone 7 or 7 Plus, then often the assistive touch icon would automatically appear on the screen. This would allow you to use a software button instead of the hardware one. Often, especially after restoring the phone, the assistive touch would not be automatically turned on- and if you’ve ever setup a new iPhone you’ll know you need to press the home button to start the process! Quite obviously this presents some difficulty if neither work. While it was possible at one point to connect the iPhone to iTunes and use your computer to turn on assistive touch, this has since been removed in an update.
Now it seems with the iPhone 8 that if the home button is damaged (or not connected), then the phone won’t even boot. It will simply display the Apple logo and reboot in a never-ending loop. If you connect a working home button- even if it isn’t the one that’s paired with the iPhone- it will boot with no problems. We even tested this to see if it was okay with a working iPhone 8 Plus home button on a regular iPhone 8 and yes, it booted. However, as soon as you disconnect the home button it won’t start up again.
What’s even more strange, is if you have restored the iPhone 8 and you are on the setup screen, it will function correctly without a home button connected… until you insert the SIM card to activate it. Once activation is successful, if you then power cycle the phone without going through the rest of the setup process, it won’t boot again! It’s clear from this that Apple is checking the home button during activation and disabling the phone if it can’t detect the home button or if it’s broken.
This is a very sneaky way of (in effect) reintroducing Error 53 without actually throwing up an error message so it doesn’t look like Apple has done anything wrong. Now you’re forced to take the device to Apple for repair as they’re the only place that can service the home button. It looks very much to us that the iPhone 8 has brought back Error 53 in a new guise. Sneaky.
(We’d also add that it should be noted that this makes it more difficult to test screens as- after having connected the home button a few hundred times- it’s very easy to wear out the FPC connector on the button itself. It’s not as if you can grab a new home button as aftermarket ones won’t work.)
iPhone 8 with broken home button plugged in via flex (hidden underneath). It can be seen that the phone fails to boot.
iPhone 8 with working but mismatched home button from another phone. Note that while button clicks don’t register, the assistive touch “home button” is visible, allowing the phone to be used- albeit in a slightly degraded manner.
