Apple iPhone 20 may lack Action Button for cleaner design

Apple has long envisioned creating an "all-screen" iPhone that eschews bezels, ports, buttons, and camera cutouts for a minimalistic design that is as clean as possible and true to Apple's ethos. The upcoming iPhone 20 that comes two decades after the OG iPhone launched in 2007 will reportedly bring it as close to that goal as possible and practical.

Part of the practical decisions about the iPhone 20 design, apart from leaving a small display cutout for the Face ID camera, after all, has been to ditch the Action Button altogether, tips an insider. It would rather be merged with the Camera Control key, with one tap launching the camera and a long press triggering the various actions that can now be assigned to the button.

In addition, the power key, volume rocker, and Camera Control would reportedly all use haptic feedback to simulate travel but stay flush with the frame for a cleaner look. An edge-to-edge quad-curved display is also expected, according to leaked patents, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman called all that the extra glass overflowing on four sides "extraordinarily complex" to pull off, which might mean a much higher iPhone 20 price.

A new LOFIC camera sensor has been tipped, as well as a bigger display and the largest ever 6,000 mAh battery on an iPhone made possible by silicon-carbon technology and all the space left after the demise of mechanical keys and the merger of the Action Button with the Camera Control.

The Action Button replaced the classic ring/silent switch on the iPhone 15 Pro series back in 2023 and will apparently be a short-lived affair. Not that the mute switch is coming back, as Apple is simply integrating the Action Button functions in another key to save space and contribute to the rumored uninterrupted design paradigm of the iPhone 20.

Apple is widely expected to skip the iPhone 19 naming scheme, just as it skipped the iPhone 9 one with the launch of the first notch-y iPhone X. It allegedly had a lot of issues with solid-state buttons that were planned as far back as the iPhone 15 Pro under a project codenamed "Bongo."

Those have reportedly been resolved, and the solid-state buttons are said to have already completed functional verification, with mass production planned for the iPhone 20 in 2027, just without an Action Button in the mix. Apple actually already launched an iPhone without an Action Button in 2026, its first foldable iPhone Duo, though that one also brought Touch ID back from the cold, so it's not exactly forward-looking in that respect.