Why is This Important?

The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus feature a number of significant changes to the internal design of the home button. This won’t affect you in normal use, but if it gets broken and needs fixed, there are some things you need to know. (Click here if you want to skip all this and go directly to your repair options).

To keep it simple, it’s generally believed most of these changes have been made to make iPhone repair by independent businesses- such as ourselves- more difficult, and hence to cut them out of the loop, forcing people to use Apple or their partners instead. These changes include:-

  • Home button now attaches via front of the screen instead of the back, increasing risk of it getting ripped off during disassembly.
  • Ribbon cable now stuck to the rear of the screen, again increasing likelihood of rip occurring during repair.
  • Home button IC (chip) on flex no longer has underfill glue, so if flex is bent too much, IC will come away and stop working (even when cable itself isn’t torn).
  • Worst of all, if iPhone spots that home button has been at all tampered with or replaced- even if that replacement is a genuine Apple part- it completely stops working and assistive touch automatically activates. On older models, this only caused Touch ID to stop working- regular use of the home button was unaffected.

Is Apple Trying to Shut Out Independent Companies?

In common with others in the independent Apple repair industry, we believe these changes have been made primarily to shut out businesses not officially affiliated with Apple (these primarily consisting of very few “big name” corporations) and restrict repair options.

We can understand the reasons for disabling Touch ID on older iPhones when the home button was replaced- this is a feature with a built-in security component after all. What appears to have no clear justification is Apple’s changing this to include all use of the home button, including non-security features.

Apple themselves aren’t affected by any of this (which makes it all the more suspicious). They have a proprietary machine called “Horizon” that makes repair of iPhones more straightforward. In addition to allowing them to employ less experienced technicians, it lets them replace the home button. As said elsewhere, despite some news stories to the contrary, Horizon is still restricted to Apple and its official partners.

Your Repair Choices

It’s unfortunate, but Apple’s choices in this area make it inevitable that even the most competent technician will at some stage run into insurmountable problems with a broken home button. This is why there’s no guaranteed fix- without access to the required “Horizon” machine, there’s no way of replacing that button.

There’s more bad news if you’re considering having Apple- or an authorised dealer- repair your phone. Generally they charge far more than independent stores (with many authorised businesses being little more than middlemen who pass most repairs to Apple)… but worse still, they’ll often not repair your phone even if you ask them to. In general, anything that goes beyond simple damage will be deemed “unrepairable” and you’ll only be offered an out-of-warranty exchange (typically a refurbished phone) at a significant percentage of the cost of a new phone. Ouch!

This has been observed with scepticism, with many people suspicious that many “unrepairable” phones are repaired and sold in turn to other customers as out-of-warranty refurb exchanges for almost pure profit.

(We’ve also seen inside many of these exchange phones- in addition to superficial case scratches and the like, the internals show a standard of workmanship far below what most people would expect from an officially-refurbished device).

 

 

To get round the fact it’s not presently practical to replace the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus home button, we’ve invested in a new tool (above, left, alongside other photos of a disassembled home button) which makes removing and repairing existing ones easier.

This is not a cure-all, unfortunately, and while we have a very high success rate, we hope you’ll understand why we still can’t guarantee 100% that all iPhone 7 home button repairs will be a success.