RecBoot

A lot of people's devices tend to get a broken button or two. Whether it is a volume button, the Home button or the Sleep/Wake button, these smart devices use combinations of buttons for many service actions. For example, on an iPhone, holding the Sleep/Wake button turns the phone off, and holding Sleep/Wake together with the Home button takes a screenshot. Putting the phone into recovery mode also requires holding the right buttons while plugging it into a computer, so with a broken button it can be impossible to restore the phone or wipe its contents before giving it to someone else. Fortunately, RecBoot (for Windows) lets you plug the device into your PC and click a button on the PC to put it into recovery mode, after which it can be restored and wiped clear of its contents with iTunes.

If some of your buttons are broken, RecBoot allows you to put an iPhone or iPod touch into recovery mode without pressing anything on the device. It's as simple as running the program, plugging the device in, and clicking Enter Recovery Mode or Exit Recovery Mode. Devices with a corrupted operating system (OS), or devices being jailbroken or troubleshot, require recovery mode for repair, and the exit button helps when a device is stuck in recovery mode.

RecBoot is a free and portable program made by hobbyist developers (the window credits iHacker and the Core Dev Team): the archive contains the executable and a few libraries, so no installation is needed. It has not been updated since 2010. The utility works with the iPhone and iPod touch models and iOS versions of its era, but newer devices and recent iOS releases are usually not recognized, so for current iPhones recovery mode has to be entered in other ways.

It easily allows you to swap a device into recovery mode without using the device's (broken) buttons.