How to get Home bar on older iPads with Home button?

Question

On my iPhone, I have a Home bar (at the bottom of my screen and no Home button and I find this very good).

Therefore, I would like to know if this is possible to do on an iPad (6th generation, running iPadOS 16.2). I know it is possible on the latest versions, but I don't know for this one. If it's possible, how to enable it?

Here is a screenshot of my iPhone with the Home bar:

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And here is the one from my iPad without Home bar:

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Answer 1

The Home bar visibility can not be toggled via any setting within iOS.

A Home bar is enabled by default and only available on any iOS/iPadOS device that lacks a physical Home button.

While all the iPhone models that lack a Home button, does feature Face ID as a mechanism for biometric authentication, the same may not be true for iPad. Some of the iPad that lack Face ID may still feature Home bar due to absence of Home button.

In addition to serving the function of helping users to navigate to the Home screen, Home bar enables additional features such swiping left or right to switch between recently used apps.

Answer 2

That home bar is a function of two things:

• iOS version
• Presence of face ID technology

The first is obvious, the OS must support it. The second, you must have Face ID because that home bar is a way to activate the biometric authentication without having a physical button as the iPad 6th gen does.