iPhone X’s Home Indicator

Apple seems to be going out of its way not to give the horizontal bar at the bottom of the iPhone X user interface a name. For example, in the “getting started” pamphlet that ships in the iPhone X box, they don’t give it a name. They just show a picture of it, with an arrow indicating the gesture, and say “Swipe up to go home.”

Those of us who write about these things need a name for it, though. I suggest “home indicator”. In Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for iPhone X, they use a similar but more verbose construction: “the indicator for accessing the Home screen”.

Update: It’s also called the home “indicator” in the UIKit APIs. (Thanks to Sachin Patel.)

★ Wednesday, 1 November 2017