Once the hotly anticipated iPhone 8 arrives in a couple of weeks, iOS veterans will have to completely change the way they interact with an Apple smartphone. The iconic home button is going away to make room for more display, and that’s great. Apple is finally ready to increase the size of the screen without making the device itself bigger. But the home button’s absence will be felt immediately by long-time iPhone users, even if the functions enabled by the home button don’t die along with the physical button.
Apple can’t just ditch the software features tied to the home button, as they’re critical to operating the device. A press on the home button is what gets you back to the home screen no matter where you are, while a double tap is what activates multitasking on the phone. Press and hold the button to invoke Siri, and double-touch on it to enable Reachability.
A report earlier this week explained how Apple is dealing with the home button’s absence. We’re going to have to learn new gestures for some of the features mentioned above, and we already saw some helpful concepts of iOS 11 running on iPhone 8.
Developer Guilherme Rambo, who recently discovered some of Apple’s own animations showing potential user changes coming to the iPhone 8 via iOS 11, imagined what the iPhone 8’s UI might look like — especially when it comes to switching apps.
Here’s how a floating dock could behave:
This is what the floating dock looks like on an iPhone pic.twitter.com/BbKVIL7yO8
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) August 30, 2017
Here’s the same dock when invoked from within apps:
And this is what the floating dock looks like on iPhone when invoked in apps pic.twitter.com/542r1SWMAr
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) August 30, 2017
Here’s multitasking on iPhone based on iPad’s iOS 11 software:
iPad app switcher works fine on iPhone. "iPhone 8" will probably use a similar approach. (Control Center not supported in simulator) pic.twitter.com/wJTaW4JRpd
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) August 31, 2017
Obviously, these are just developer-made animations and they’re not confirmed iOS 11 features. However, Apple will surely dedicate plenty of time during its September 12th launch event to explaining all the iOS 11 features that were not revealed back in June at WWDC.
