Did you recently perform an iPhone 7 screen replacement? Is your iPhone 7 home button not working? This is a pretty common problem. While there isn’t always an easy fix, here are three solutions you can try to get your phone back to working order.
Reset The Phone
Doing a full restore on the phone’s software can sometimes help. Back up your phone, reboot your phone into DFU mode and perform a complete restore. In a lot of cases, this will fix your home button wonderfully without any hardware work.
Check The Cable
The home button and 3D touch share a single cable that leads to your phone’s internals. Unfortunately, this cable is incredibly fragile. To check it, you’ll have to remove the metal plate that’s behind your screen.
If there’s damage to this cable, you’ll have to replace your entire backlight. In some cases, you can salvage the backlight from your old screen. Replacement backlights aren’t terribly expensive, so it’s not too important either way. The actual repair can get a bit tricky. Consider finding a professional to avoid damaging your phone.
If you want to do the replacement yourself, here’s how:
- Open your phone.
- Use a heat gun to carefully loosen the adhesive. Only a very small amount of heat is necessary.
- Carefully slice the adhesive around the top and sides of the backlight.
- Using a playing card or other stiff, thin object to separate the backlight from the case and LCD screen. Be especially careful not to damage the foil around the 3D touchpad.
- Replace the backlight.
- Carefully clean the outside of your screen before re-assembling your phone.
Play With Pairings
Many service technicians and amateur phone repairmen think that Apple has wired the home buttons to only work with their original screens. This issue isn’t consistent. Lots of repair shops claim they can perform an iPhone 7 screen replacement with or without home buttons with no problems… most of the time. For even the most careful professional, about one in 8 phones winds up with a dead home button for no apparent reason.
Change things around with your phone and see what happens. Does the old home button still work with the old screen? What about the old home button with the new screen? The new home button with the new screen? Some techs suggest that cheap replacement screens don’t come with proper cables for full home button functionality. Look into the screen you purchased. Was it from a reputable company with positive reviews? You may need to replace the cable or the entire screen assembly for one with a better connection.
Turn On Assistive Touch
While it’s not necessarily an ideal solution, you can turn on a software home button rather than rely on the physical one that failed. When you turn on Assistive Touch, your phone’s operating system will put a virtual home button at the bottom of your screen. It’ll give off a little buzz when you touch it to simulate the feeling of your physical button.
To turn on this feature, use one of these methods:
- Tell Siri: “Turn on Assistive Touch”
- Go to Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Assistive Touch. Turn it on.
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