Game Center shortcut breaks Steam Link style shortcuts OS wide.

ios26 or a recent Game Center update apparently changed the shortcut to a single press of the controllers home button, which is what Steam/Steam link and consoles have used for at least the past decade. The single press doesn’t interrupt with the full Game Center app, just Notification Center in the upper right corner about Game Center supporting Steam link, but it can’t be disabled for people who don’t use Game Center at all.

Like before, to open Game Center in full, a long press of the home button is needed, so this purely serves as a button intercept to display the notification. So Game Center is grabbing the default controller button which virtually all consoles use to bring up their menus, and providing a workaround that doesn’t actually work (pressing the button twice instead). And I’ve tried the workaround in a few apps, it hasn’t worked in anything. Game Center is obviously counting the presses, cause it will open only on odd number of presses, but it never sends the button press to the app now.

There’s also an option under settings->general->controller to set the home button to open different apps (but not to set it back to be app controlled). Even if I set the controller home button function to open other apps, it still opens the Game Center notification, so something in general seems broken here.

The behavior should really be reversed in any case. It’s expected that pressing the the home button on a controller brings up the apps native menu. Double pressing or long pressing rarely do anything, so they’re perfect alternatives for Apple to do whatever they want with. In its current state, you cannot access Steams menu while using a controller at all which is a huge usability issue.

If anyone has a real fix, I’d really appreciate it. If someone knows whether this came along with iOS 26 or a Game Center update after, that would be nice to know as well.