Home button flaky? Jailbroken? Check this out...

psylichon

psylichon

Genius
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#1
Oct 31, 2007
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Philly
#1
So like a lot of people, my home button can be rather unresponsive at times. I've all but ruled out a hardware issue, though. I'm pretty convinced it's a jailbreak issue.

I've been uninstalling and disabling my various tweaks to try and get to the bottom of the flakiness. My home button is fine after a respring or reboot but slowly gets more and more unresponsive until I basically can't use it at all. And I think I've narrowed it down to Activator. Now, Activator is one of the main reasons I jailbreak, so I don't like the idea of ditching it. But today I tried disabling its mobile substrate in SBSettings' "more" section. I thought this would disable it entirely but it seems to still work properly. And the best thing is that my home button has not lost responsiveness all day long without a single respring or reboot.

Now I've only tried this for a day, but I'd like some verification if anyone else is experiencing this symptom. Also, I'd like to know why disabling the Activator mobile substrate doesn't actually disable it! I'm not complaining if it works... just curious.
 
emhcee

emhcee

Member
Bronze
#2
Apr 4, 2008
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#2
Interesting find... I've had that same flakiness as well with the home button, but had just chalked it up to the button getting mechanically worn out. Worth giving it a shot and see what happens.
 
psylichon

psylichon

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#3
Oct 31, 2007
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Philly
#3
Still working like a charm. This was never a problem before updating from 4.3.3 to 5.0.1. It's been an everyday aggravation since. I really think this tweak, for whatever reason, has solved it for me. Just wish I knew what was really going on.
 
chazm

chazm

Contributor
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#5
May 1, 2008
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#5
God I hope my 4S doesn't get this problem. All 3 of my iPhone 4's had this problem. So far, I'm ok. But I believe it's 100% hardware
 
chazm

chazm

Contributor
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#9
May 1, 2008
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#9
psylichon said:
The 4
Click to expand...
IMO it's the iPhone 4. All 3 of my iPhone 4's had the home button problem. My GF's 4 has happened one 2 different phones and my roommate has the same problem. Now that I've had the 4S for over 4 months I haven't had a hiccup once.
 
djwindsor

djwindsor

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#12
Jul 7, 2009
755
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Neponsit, NY
#12
I agree and concur with the OP. I too had the same issue and narrowed it down to activator. I deactivated in MS and actually tried to delete it but when you try to delete it, quite a few other files I need will be deleted. I then compromised and turned off all the gestures since doing that essentially makes the app useless and non intrusive. I got a much better app which behaves perfectly. The one I got is zephyr and I use it with a swipe up gesture to emulate the home button. It works very well.
 
Hawk

Hawk

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Gold
#13
Aug 2, 2007
6,682
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ATL
#13
Thanks. I'm going to try this out. I will say that my home button isn't as much a problem as the music app, which tends to crash a LOT recently. But it's crashing when I hit the home button to unlock if the screen went to sleep. I hit home, start to slide to unlock, and the whole thing freezes and then reboots to safe mode. Happens almost every time I use the music app now. If my crashes suddenly go away, then there is something really wrong with activator and its home button integration.
 
Europa

Europa

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Senior Moderator
#19
Dec 12, 2008
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#19
FlwrPwer said:
haven't updated to 5.1 yet. So I guess that makes me 5.0.1? Yeah, I think that's it. It's been flaky for a while now though.
Click to expand...
Yep, 5.0.1. You could try a restore to factory settings. If that doesn't work, it's almost certainly a hardware-related problem. There isn't much to lose in testing it since you can backup right before you restore and then apply the backup after testing it. IMO, the home button on the iPhone 4 tends to wear out sooner than it did on the older iPhones. I doesn't affect all of them, but it isn't uncommon and Apple will replace them for free if it's under warranty. They sometimes replace them for free even if they are out of warranty.
 
Bakuto

Bakuto

New Member
#20
Jun 26, 2012
1
0
1
#20
psylichon said:
So like a lot of people, my home button can be rather unresponsive at times. I've all but ruled out a hardware issue, though. I'm pretty convinced it's a jailbreak issue.

I've been uninstalling and disabling my various tweaks to try and get to the bottom of the flakiness. My home button is fine after a respring or reboot but slowly gets more and more unresponsive until I basically can't use it at all. And I think I've narrowed it down to Activator. Now, Activator is one of the main reasons I jailbreak, so I don't like the idea of ditching it. But today I tried disabling its mobile substrate in SBSettings' "more" section. I thought this would disable it entirely but it seems to still work properly. And the best thing is that my home button has not lost responsiveness all day long without a single respring or reboot.

Now I've only tried this for a day, but I'd like some verification if anyone else is experiencing this symptom. Also, I'd like to know why disabling the Activator mobile substrate doesn't actually disable it! I'm not complaining if it works... just curious.
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot! My button worked so sporadically I wanted to throw the phone at times... Disabling Activator in mobile substrate worked for me... Also only happened after upgrading to v5.1. Thanks again!
 
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