Black Camera.app Screen and Broken Shutter Button
This is about to drive me crazy, whenever I capture a snapshot, when I press the camera, sometimes a black screen pops up and this doesn’t go away, I can’t shoot anything, I have to go in and out of the camera again.
There are two really annoying iOS camera bugs, which I’ve been meaning to write about for years:
Sometimes, when I launch the Camera app, I see the controls but everything else is black. It’s as if there’s a cover over the lens. Exiting and reopening the app fixes the problem, although if I had opened the camera from the lock screen, swiping back to the lock screen and then swiping back to the camera does not always work. Sometimes I have to actually unlock the phone or force-quit the Camera app to “reset” it. In rare cases, I have to reboot the phone.
Sometimes the big circular shutter button doesn’t respond. It doesn’t take the photo or even animate to show that it was tapped. It’s as if there’s not actually a button there. When this happens, the physical shutter/volume button does work, although it’s not always ergonomic depending on how I’m taking the photo. Again, it takes varying degrees of resetting the app to get the software button to work again.
Imagine this happening when you’re trying to capture a moment that is absolutely impossible to recreate. Like the birth of your child.
This did indeed happen yesterday with my son—not his birth, but a really cute moment that I missed capturing. And this was far from the first time.
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This has been happening to me often and I assumed it was my phone specifically.
feels like activating the camera from the lock screen just to get a blank black screen and miss the shot has been happening to me for years, one reason I bought my first new "real" camera since forever. gave up the high dynamic range and p3 color for reliability. what happened to the camera team being one of the best in cupertino?
Holy crap I thought it was just me! Specifically that first bug—with the black screen—happens to me ALL the time. Every time, it makes me think that the one thing that this app needs to do is, no matter what, open instantly and be able to take a picture. But so often something happens that’s gone in a moment, but I was fast enough to get my phone out and open the camera app, only for the stupid black screen thing to happen. It’s such a memorable bug because it really only happens when you really need it not to.
The iOS camera bug where the screen goes black or the controls stop responding is really infuriating. I’ve put up with it for years, across multiple phones. It seems sometimes like the phone is/gets warm, too, almost as if the problem is that the iPhone is struggling to process something, and that is making the camera interface lag or lock up.
The black screen thing has been happening on my last 3 phones, that I specifically remember, 12 Pro, 13 Pro Max, and now on my 15 Pro Max. Closing and reopening always works but boy is it frustrating.
Same here - on two different iPhones (12 and 13 Mini). Has Apple acknowledged this as a bug already?
