New information hidden in Apple's HomePod firmware has revealed fresh details about the iPhone 8 (AAPL)

iPhone 8 concept/render

The developers who found references of the new iPhone's design in the unreleased HomePod speaker's firmware over the course of the weekend have dug deeper and found some new information about the upcoming iPhone.

The tentatively-named "iPhone 8" will seemingly come with a new design that features an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display, which will stretch across the entire front surface of the device.

In doing so, Apple will ditch the iconic physical home button, which has led to speculation about what the company will replace it with, and where the Touch ID fingerprint reader will go.

@stroughtonsmith And the death of the home button is confirmed. RIP. http://pic.twitter.com/w638s4Tgzn
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) August 1, 2017

As first reported by The Verge, developers Steve Troughton-Smith and Guilherme Rambo tweeted their discoveries, and found that the home button is likely going away for good, replaced by a "home indicator" that will only appear when useful, while remaining hidden in certain use cases (such as when watching a video).

There have been long-running rumours that claimed Apple was looking into implementing the fingerprint scanning technology right underneath the display, but more recent findings seem to have shot the idea down, in favour of a yet-unseen face-scanning technology Apple refers to as "Pearl ID" in its files.

There's also a lot of new references to facial expression detection http://pic.twitter.com/8PsPVj1QqU
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) August 1, 2017

There is also a so-called "attention detection" feature that developers saw in the code, with references such as "mouthstretch," "mouthsmile," and "mounthdimple," highlighting how Apple wants to make the scanning technology as accurate as possible — which it must do if it wants to replace Touch ID, or risk becoming a huge problem.

It looks like the new iPhones might support 'tap to wake', much like Windows Phones/Lumias
— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) August 1, 2017

In addition to that, the developers found references to features such as "tap to wake," which would allow users to simply tap on the device's display to turn it on (which would come in handy in the absence of a physical button to press), as well as links to the iPhone 8's potential screen resolution, which could be as significant as that brought by the iPhone 4 and the original "Retina Display."

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