My iPhone 6s home button is really hot and the device won't turn on

Thanks botsmack for the info.

Everyone, simply complaining on the community will not help at all. And it is hard for Apple to go through all the posts to extract useful information. After we put our post here, if we all can provide some feedback information to Apple(http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html), please do so. Helping Apple collect the feedback information, and they should be able to tell the problem at some point. I am sure they will do some data mining after a lot of information are collected.

My suggestion to everybody is to provide the following information, the reasons are that they are all running at the background whether your iPhone is sleep or not. And if this happened to you like 10 days ago, and you couldn't remember anything, please do so the next time it happens(hopefully there will not be a next time).

1. Briefly described what, when, where, how(if possible) it was happened.
2. Background App Refresh: on or off, what are the apps. (this could be helpful to determine if the background app refresh is causing the problem)
3. Last time backup to iCloud (was it because of the backup?)
4. Running apps after reset (iPhone will restore the apps to their status before the crash, this might be helpful)
5. Alarm (could be the trigger?)
6. Do not disturb
7. Bluetooth: on or off
8. Location services ( list the apps that has recently used your location (solid purple arrow) or used your location within the last 24 hours (solid grey arrow)
9. Air drop status
10. List of apps that may sync their data in the background

That's all I can think of based on how I use my iPhone. You can add more information if you like because everybody uses the iPhone differently.

Then let's just hope this issue will be solved very soon.

I agree that Apple possibly isn't scraping these forums looking for issues. I opened a case online reporting the symptoms but so far I have decided not to replace the phone itself as at least for me, switching up to 9.1B4 has "resolved" the problem in that it hasn't returned in at least a couple of weeks. I don't know if that's statistically significant but no other changes have been made, I haven't changed any alarms, background app settings, bluetooth etc. I did not do a wipe and restore either, I just updated. So my feeling is this is largely software and if the TouchID is getting hot, that suggests to me (along with reported battery drains) that it's in some kind of software driven loop running for much longer than designed. Maybe something triggers the "there's a finger" code and it's a false alarm but an edge case where it doesn't give up. This might explain why laying face down on a desk, or being in your pocket are relevant when something comes into "contact" with the sensor.

I haven't seen anybody comment on whether they swapped out their phone and that resolved it for them. Honestly if it were pure hardware I would expect it to fail pretty much all the time.

My 2c.

Question: is this happening to you when the phone is face down?

Alternatively, for those of you who see this occurring often, can you try setting you phone with your screen face down?

In my case both of the times I’ve seen this, my phone was face up or jiggling around on a car seat.

The reasoning behind my question extrapolates from these two assumptions of mine:

1. In IOS9 Apple now “saves battery” by not turning on the phone’s notifications when the screen isn’t visible. So let’s assume that maybe, just maybe they actually plumbed this through to other subcomponents. In that case they may also save power by not triggering the Touch ID sensor.
2. The 6S’s Touch ID got updated to recognize the finger print faster. Well, what if this is a combination of SW + HW by which the sensor’s “on” time got reduced by some predictive enabling of the sensor via gyro position, etc. IF this is the case, then the issue might be that the sensor is essentially turning on looking for a finger under some circumstances that are likely to encounter a finger, but for some unfortunate code path isn’t running off… OR if this is a machine learned algo, maybe the classifier always returns true (finger likely coming) which is an unfortunate endless loop which then triggers more bad thing throughout the stack.

Anyways these are wild stipulations from my engineering brain… but if any of these are correct, we may see a software fix for this. Actually even if I’m wrong, the sensor might have a temp sensor around on the board or even a “frame counter” that could be queried to trigger some reset, etc.

I just hope Apple is aware of this and working on it. We understand secrecy, but just tell us you are ;-)

I do have a replacement phone that I’ll setup over the weekend, but per the complaints on this board, I start to doubt that this is purely a case of “early sensors” being bad or having premature failure, etc. I really think this is algorithmic, but no matter what I’ll report again is I see it on the new phone – though maybe “face down” approach could mitigate this.

It would appear that in that thread, that persons account is far more INFREQUENT than ALL the other accounts since 91.b4 that prove otherwise.

Like I've said several times, since 91.b4, this is now nearly 10 days, on two phones, NO HOT BUTTON and NO CRASHES.

Not saying this to @cchandl specficially, but to ALL the other people continuing to come to this thread and say they have had the problem and complain and want to return the phone. That is fine, return it, but you're most likely going to have the same issue as this is almost certainly a software issue since betas since 91.b4 have cleared it up for the MAJORITY of testers.

if one doesn't want to download and install the latest public beta, that's fine too. but returning the phone is most likely not going to solve it. Wait till 9.1 GM or upgrade, for the time being those are the only choices.

My apologies if this has already been mentioned. I didn't read all of the posts.

Some protective cases can have an insulating effect on your iPhone and lock in heat.

In my opinion, it is not a good idea to habitually leave your phone plugged in overnight to charge. If this is done with a case that locks the heat it, it will cause your phone to overheat.

Prolonged heat exposure will damage the lithium ion battery in your phone and shorten its life span and ability to retain a charge.

Lithium batteries (in smartphones and laptops, for example) function optimally with frequent small/partial discharges and charges rather than being completely discharged then completely charged.

Howard

renees85 wrote:

Also interesting to note, my watch seemed to still be connected the entire time my phone was "dead", which was for at least 30 minutes. I tried making a call from my watch though and it failed. So I feel like the phone was still on but stuck in some overheating/screen blackout nightmare. Anyone been successful in getting their phone replaced?

My theory is that the phone is actually STILL ON, but the screen is off or blacked out or shut down from a temperature rise.. when I had this problem (before upgrading to 91.b4+ of course) the phone seemed to still be connected to the watch and the bluetooth home phone system.

Same issue happened to me this morning. Got my 6S Plus from the store on the day it became available and this is the first issue I have had. I went to bed last night with the battery level around 50% and just set it on my nightstand and didn't plug it in. Woke up this morning and screen wouldn't turn on. I plugged it in for over an hour and still no luck. When my wife eventually looked at it, she informed me that the home button was super hot and it was. I found this support article and the same trick worked for turning it back on. i set up an apple appointment at the store about an hour away before I was able to get my phone back on. Now that's it's working again, I'm torn as to whether I should actually make the trip to get it looked at now. By the way, my phone is a 64GB 6S Plus 64GB and is running the latest 9.1 public beta. I also checked with the Battery Memory System Status Monitor app and my device has the chip made by TSMC, not Samsung. So it appears as though this issue happens to both the phones with Samsung and TSMC chips.

miko_ wrote:

Actually, AppleCare phone support referred me to the retail store and they have replaced it. My home button actually shocked me in addition to it getting hot.

Not really saying I don't believe you, but that is the first I have read of anyone getting "shocked" by the home button. Hot, yes, some say it could BURN - which I'm also skeptical of since I've done temperature readings on several devices that exhibit this issue, but shocked is shocking.

I wanted to take a moment and pop in here after I received the notification to thank you for this post. We need more guys like you in the world.

As for my case– after a chat with Apple Support over the phone outlining this issue, I was advised to head to the Genius Bar. They replaced my phone on 10/29. I have not had any issues since.

I am on holidays in Asia now. My brand new iPhone 6s Plus 128GB went black & the home button went very hot. After many retries it turned on again. I noticed the battery drained about 35%. It just happened & I will report back if it happens again.

This happened to my IPhone 6S today. I did update last night to iOS 9.02. The phone said 75% charged and suddenly started to get very hot. Eventually it powered off and had to be recharged. The phone never runs out of power normally until the end of the day if at all. I restarted, charged it up and it appears to be working okay for now.

Yesterday night, while inserting my Iphone 6s to the Lightning dock, I encountered the problem.

I noticed the home button was slowly getting hot and looked up for any remedy. The hard reset worked.

I upgraded to ios 9.2 and hopefully the problem will not return.

6s 64 gb

gold

Telfort

I ran into this issue this morning as well, for the first time ever. Was using my phone in the morning as normal. 10 minutes later, I picked it up to check the time, and nothing. Totally dead. I knew it couldnt have been a dead battery, because I was in the 60% range. tried to hit all the buttons, tried to plug it in, nothing. Noticed a little while later that the home button was getting hot. Quickly Googled it, found this conversation, and did the reset thing. Turned back on and seems like its running normally now, but very weird. Also running an iPhone 6s with iOS 9.3.

So frustrating! I called Apple yesterday and she told me to make an appt at the closest Apple store. She said they will probably give me a new phone since I've only had it for 5 months. From reading through posts I noticed that someone mentioned something about it being possibly caused by the fingerprint option. Which I did have on. So for now I turned that off until I can get into the Apple store. Which of course isn't until Thursday evening.

Just spoke to Apple senior support engineer, suggested to do a full factory reset, from iTunes, not from the iPhone. Something to do with faulty iOS code with regards to the finger print scanner.... Fingers crossed.....