I never understood why Apple kept putting it on the front. It's so much better on the back like it is on most Android phones. You can unlock the phone without having to adjust your grip on it, which is great.

This home button/fingerprint reader combo is taking up so much precious real estate on what is a small device, and I just don't get it. It seems like bad design to me.

> on the back like it is on most Android phones

The jury is solidly still out on the "better" part. There's no consensus between customers on this topic. Manufacturers who placed the fingerprint sensor (and power button, earlier) on the back, or even the side despite the clear disadvantage of having a tiny sensor, did so to make the bottom bezel slightly smaller, not because of proven better ergonomics. And given the opportunity they switched back to the front, under the screen. Most also chase thinness at the price of smaller batteries which says nothing about the soundness of the decision.

> This home button/fingerprint reader combo is taking up so much precious real estate

The button is there because the design comes from a time when the screens were small so on-screen buttons were a waste, and the body needed to be large enough to accommodate everything else. This phone is an iPhone 8 with a better SoC. It's not a new design or even a redesign.

The design isn't bad, it's old. And it's old so it can be cheap. They achieved a worthwhile result a pricepoint where at the very least it provides exceptional software support and a current generation SoC. There are few phones that serve that segment (OP5 was pretty much the last one in the price range - good SoC, OKish support, regular old bezels). You can freely sacrifice this for better screen to body ratio phones if that quality is more appealing.

You make it sound like the iphone 8 came out ages ago. It was two and a half years ago. We were long past the point of on-screen buttons being a waste, or the body needing to be larger. In phone-land this isn't an old design, it's a retro design. It doesn't save money to do it this way.

> You make it sound like the iphone 8 came out ages ago.

The design features relevant for this discussion (bezels, physical button) didn't come out with the iPhone 8. I'm counting the age of the design since it was first introduced, not since last use. It is an old, successful design which leads to a cheaper phone.

> It doesn't save money to do it this way.

Of course it does. Any new design and part made for this phone implies extra expenses - new tooling, assembly lines, supply chains, etc. This drives up the cost and price of the phone. And you can't save money by sharing/reusing too much of what you have in place for your flagship line because for every $400 phone you make you took capacity away from a $1000 phone. So old stuff gets reused. You get a much cheaper phone by slightly upgrading the $300 iPhone 8 than the $800 iPhone 11. Works like this in every industry.

I have used android phones with a backside fingerprint scanner and it worked really well. Apple can be incredibly stubborn some time and hold onto something for way too long. It was the same with the one button mouse.

Probably to allow unlocking without lifting it off the surface it's on.

The main button was on the front, so they integrated the fingerprint reader into it. Moving the main button to the side or back might have worked but would have been non-intuitive for many users (e.g. my mom just realized her iPhone 11 that she got launch day has a mute switch, and that she has had it engaged for weeks). A back fingerprint sensor would also require some gestures to change, such as swipe to unlock - attempting a complex motion while also attempting to reposition your grip to hit a sensor on the back is going to increase drop rate.

They got rid of the button and the fingerprint sensor in one go, so there was never an opportunity to have just a fingerprint sensor on the back.

It's frankly one of the reasons I got rid of my iPhone 6S shortly after buying it, for another Android phone. A lot of Apple's ergonomic choices just seemed bizarre to me compared to most Android devices. I'm sure they've gotten better since, but things like the fingerprint reader on the front were in my opinion bizarre and made me have to completely hold the phone different just for my fingerprint, where on most Android phones my finger is already right there in its normal usage position in my hand.

Which is why Apple created Face ID to solve this problem.