The home button doesn’t make a lot of sense to begin with. When I was introduced to the iPhone back in 2007, the very first question I asked was, “If the whole screen is touch-sensitive, why do you need a physical button?”
Things got more confusing when one of my wife’s friends enabled her iPhone’s AssistiveTouch on-screen home button, “If Apple already has a software home button built in, why keep the physical one?”
Removing the physical home button means less mechanical parts to assemble, fewer things to break, and better waterproofing. It also means you can put a larger screen on a smaller device. From a design perspective, it was bad to ever put it on the iPhone in the first place, so why did Apple do it?
The answer is usability. Back when the iPhone first came out, nobody was familiar with how to navigate a smartphone user interface, and ideas like swiping & finger gestures were new concepts to most users. The home button was an intuitive way to prevent people from getting lost & frustrated.
Later, Apple painted themselves into a corner by adding Touch ID fingerprint recognition to home button, which made it more difficult to get rid of the button when Apple decided to go to a full touchscreen on the front face.
To answer the question: Apple removed the home button because it prevented them from making a full-screen bezel-less display, and they were able to do it because users understand smartphones well enough to use the bottom-swipe as an alternative to a mechanical button.
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