Should Apple offer a user-definable hardware button on iPhone?

With Samsung’s just-launched Galaxy S10, you can define a hardware button to open an app of your choice.
“It’s that element I find rather appealing: a hardware function button I can assign to do anything I want,” Ben Lovejoy writes for 9to5Mac. “I know, I know: Apple hates hardware buttons. The whole basis of the iPhone was that it did away with the physical keyboards used by other smartphones of the time, and of course the iPhone X dropped the Home button. So I’m unlikely to get my wish, but I’ll make the case anyway.”
“My iPhone is my main camera. I use it as such at least once a day, often more. But if time is of the essence – something you want to photograph immediately – the iPhone is less than ideal. You have to tap the screen to wake it, then hold down the camera button on the Lock screen, wait for the haptic response, then release the button. You can also swipe left in the main area, but that’s something you simply have to know,” Lovejoy writes. “(Incidentally, I keep Raise To Wake disabled because I don’t want my phone powering on every time I pick it up to move to another room, or to put it into a pocket.)”
MacDailyNews Take: We keep Raise to Wake enabled on all of our X-class iPhones because it’s one of the best features Apple’s ever offered. With it enabled, you pick up your iPhone, press the Camera icon on the lower left and snap your photograph in about one second. No hardware button necessary.

“But the beauty of making it user-configurable is that it wouldn’t have to be used in that way,” Lovejoy writes. “You might be one of those people who checks Twitter every five minutes. You could configure the button to open the Twitter app.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple doesn’t just hate buttons, they want to remove as many of them as possible. As per Ben’s Twitter example, with Raise to Wake enabled, you just pick up the iPhone, flick up, and tap Twitter on your iPhone’s Dock (it’s there because you’re a heavy Twitter user who checks it every five minutes). The whole process takes less than a second. There’s no need for another hardware button.