Quite sure it's done in order to speed up the camera app performance and reduce the time to first photo time. The camera module requires some tenths of a second to boot up and it makes sense to start that process at the earliest indication of user's interaction.
In this case, a touch-down is a good indication, even if user ends up swiping instead of touch-up.
The same thing happens in the lock screen, if you hold your finger on the lock screen and move 1 pixel to the left, the camera module starts up even if you don't finish your swipe to camera gesture.
Non-preloaded apps can't access your camera feed unless they are open in the foreground (zero days aside, but you're probably not interesting enough to burn one on).
I put all of my apps into category folders at the top row, so I can see my background photo that I really enjoy. Once you do this for long enough, it is jarring to see the chaotic placement of app icons all over the screen on most people's devices.
Also I never use the camera app icon, I swipe left from the lock screen 99% of the time, and the remaining 1% is from things like auth apps opening it to scan QR codes for new accounts, etc.
> if you hover your finger over the Camera app icon without actually opening the app, the camera starts operating
iOS 18.3, cannot recreate this. If I long-press the icon then yeah obviously it triggers, but just “hovering” does nothing for me. In addition, if I put my finger on the camera app icon and then swipe pages it doesn’t trigger the dot either. Is this a new thing in 26.x?
Edit: actually there is a timing sweet spot on the swiping that I can get to do it, but still nothing with just pure hovering
I couldn’t get it to trigger until I opened the camera app and made sure to switch to the front facing camera before exiting. After doing that I was able to consistently trigger the indicator when swiping across and long-pressing the icon.
EDIT: it also only seems to happen if the camera icon is on one of your Home Screen pages. I haven’t been able to reproduce the behavior when swiping across the icon while in the App Library. Wonder why they decided to do it that way? Do most people keep a camera icon on their Home Screen? That would be baffling to me. Why clutter your Home Screen when you can so easily access the camera from the lock screen or by using the physical camera button on newer iPhones?
> Why clutter your Home Screen when you can so easily access the camera from the lock screen
Half the time since updating to iOS 26 on my 13 mini, if I try to activate the camera from the lock screen the app opens but the camera fails to start and the view just stays black, and then I have to exit and try again. It's quite annoying. This does not happen with the camera app after unlocking the phone.
Hmm, I don't think so, but I do get the awful indoor lighting flicker when shooting slow-mo at 240fps that completely ruins indoor videos, and it really seems like Apple could just fix that if they cared at all.
I’m pretty sure that’s because the lights are actually flickering.
The lights are the issue not the camera.
Rooms with these lights give me migraines. I can always tell when lights in a room are like that, and I use the 240hz slow motion on my phone to double check or figure out which specific lights are the issue.
I hate these lights and I don’t understand why places use them.
> I’m pretty sure that’s because the lights are actually flickering
They are, but the camera stack should be detecting and compensating for that - it's pretty easy to detect, since it should be a fixed 50/60Hz depending on geographic location. You typically have to implement this filtering on all manner of light sensors.
Fair enough, but then I can think of an even better place to put the icon: the control center that is a single swipe away from any screen in the OS. This is all moot in newer iPhones tho, as the physical camera button in the lower right is the easiest and fastest way to get to the camera.
Anyhow, this is all just personal preference, of course. Anyone is free to put a camera icon anywhere they please. I just personally can’t stand clutter in my home or lock screens, so I tend to keep the number of apps there to a minimum and access everything else either via Spotlight or Control Center widgets.
No issue making this happen on IOS 26. Camera was lower left icon exactly where I touch go swipe, holding phone in left hand.Put finger down and swiped, green light on. Moved it to the right side.
I was under the impression that sophisticated iOS malware like Pegasus can access the camera without turning on the dot. This is certainly possible on MacOS.
Are you sure about this for Macs? My understanding of recentish models is that the power for the camera passes through the light, so it’s impossible to turn on the camera without the light.
You saved me from wiping my phone this morning - thanks. I kept seeing the dot when but the privacy report only said "camera". This gives me a lot of reassurance.
More annoying is that it's really difficult for me to unlock the phone with the side button without activating Siri. Seems like there's often a lag when waking the phone that causes a long press to be detected even with a short press.
Wait, iphones now support detection of finger hover? I remember hearing about iOS introducing software support for this, presumably for when the hardware can catch up. But never heard of it actually being implemented.
I think capacitive touchscreens always did? It was never reliable enough or something. The panels generate scanned strength maps for the whole displays. Values for locations that aren't being touched aren't zeroes.
Of course not. Only tapping. But the camera hardware gets booted up as soon as you tap the icon, without waiting to see if the tap is a swipe, and without waiting for you to lift your finger (which is when other apps would open).
Actually of course yes, every capacitive touchscreen has basic hover capabilities in some form, it’s just a fairly narrow range (a few mm at most) and not exposed as a public API.
There's an API in iOS/iPadOS named UIHoverGestureRecognizer, but it only detects hover from cursors and from the Apple Pencil. The Apple Pencil hover is neat and actual "hover" detection in the way you're thinking; it can be detected up to 12mm away from the screen. But right now there's no actual detection for finger hover, even though Apple patented a technique for it almost 10 years ago.
>Because hovering a finger on the Camera app icon is enough,
Like others I can't get this replicated either.
And even if I did not sure I'd care. My iphone has so much information on me already an extra 500ms of camera on seems pretty immaterial compared to other risks (like tracker in your pocket 24/7, constantly leaking info to god knows what app's servers etc)
I wasn't clear about what I meant by hovering: you touch the icon but then you move your finger somewhere else so the app never gets opened. I've edited the post to make this clearer.
I think you're missing the point of the post, which I actually also initially missed based on the misleading title. The author isn't saying that the camera app activating the camera and green light is a problem. The author is saying that he's unknowingly activating the camera app by simply touching the app icon, which in turn activates the green light and makes him think something nefarious is going on. However, this is a false positive that can contribute to alert fatigue and cause users to entirely ignore the green light.
I think it’s so smart of them to do this to improve UX, which I really care about. You can just tell they had a creative workshop around optimizing camera startup time (which is super important to optimize and one of the many reasons I own an iPhone!).
I’m happy to see them being so open about it in the privacy report. It shows that it’s a real priority for them: It would’ve been easier to hide this as an implementation detail and not have people wonder about it. Another big reason to own an iPhone.
However, it is yet another example of them making full use of owning the platform in ways I assume other players can’t. The Apple camera app will always start faster than others, which is a loss for customization and competition.
Beyond hover detection causing the app to preload (TIL that's apparently a thing? Can anyone confirm?), another case I've seen is trying to slide up to unlock but accidentally triggering the lock screen camera for a millisecond or two, which also causes the indicator to linger for a few seconds.
edit: Is this actual "hover without touching screen", which is what I was shocked about, or is this more like "finger passes over the icon while swiping between pages"?
Trying to decide whether I'm taken aback more at the green dot when touching the camera icon during a swipe, or at my own failure to notice it before …
When i think about it, I would be absolutely terrified by smartphone cameras. Think laptop accessories that cover the webcam - haven't seen any of those for smartphones. Yet we trust a green dot with all our heart nowadays. Back in the day when cameras started showing up on mobile phones there were even versions of popular business feature phones that lacked the camera (Nokia E51 if i recall correctly), probably triggered by requirements of clients with strict information security standards.
It seems we all learned to stop worrying and love the cameras.
My wife worked in a facility that didn't allow phone cameras. You had to check it in anytime you went into one of the secure areas or prove you had one of their phones that had the camera disabled if you were important enough to require being contactable. While I'm sure one or more of the thousands of employees managed to leak some valuable info through conversations, pictures would have been worth 1000x as much if not more.
I'd be far more worried about an ability for 3rd parties to record audio at any moment than for them to be able to record video of what's likely my pocket or desk surface at any given moment.
Same concern of many I have with laptops and theoretical webcam recording. Theres far worse things they could be stealthily doing.
You trust the green dot with your heart simply because they wired it in series with the camera. Can’t be bypassed unless you opened the device and bypassed the green light. This is why people with webcam covers on macbooks are fools: they fear and yet they do not care to understand what it is they fear to see if it is actually worth fearing.
The problem is that apparently, often enough that is just not the case.
On laptops, the LED is not powered with the camera, but controlled by it. And on smartphones, if it's a green dot on the display it can obviously be bypassed in different ways given the right vulnerabilities.
Also, aside from that, your condescending attitude is frustrating.
There are so many things that would have to go wrong for a third party app to surreptitiously activate your camera and pick up images in the background on iOS, this is tin foil hat level concern.
It’s also hilarious how many people worry about covering up their camera on the laptop not thinking that the microphone can pick up much more information in the surrounding area - again worrying about the wrong thing.
Also see, not using biometric security because in the US, police can’t legally make you give up your password - even though police are not above rubber hose decryption, judges hold people in contempt indefinitely and iPhone and Android phones are laughable insecure after first unlock after rebooting your phone.
>It’s also hilarious how many people worry about covering up their camera on the laptop not thinking that the microphone can pick up much more information in the surrounding area - again worrying about the wrong thing.
Or they worry about the right thing, its just not what you worry about.
You ever see The Accountant? That scene where he goes home and ups the stimulation to 13/10? I live my life in that world. Good luck getting any useful intel from my phone's microphone.
The absolute best phone-camera-wise was the SNAFU in the past where every access to the camera would turn the green light on... Except for one obscure company that happened to have a free pass. I don't remember the details and won't bother to check but it went a bit like this: "Jack's Petrolhead Garage is the only company in the world that can turn the phone's camera on WITHOUT the green light turning on". Some people eventually found out about this and it made headlines.
Then of course the damage control started --and those always turning a blind eye to the state's wrongdoings are surely going to still damage control this--: "oh but Jack is the nephew of the cousin of that engineer at this company and historically they helped us write one of the first app using the camera".
Or whatever bullshit nonsense explanation they came up with.
If you ask me: Jack's Petrolhead Garage (name I made up) was a NSA front and you can shove your excuses where the light doesn't shine.
Quite sure it's done in order to speed up the camera app performance and reduce the time to first photo time. The camera module requires some tenths of a second to boot up and it makes sense to start that process at the earliest indication of user's interaction. In this case, a touch-down is a good indication, even if user ends up swiping instead of touch-up. The same thing happens in the lock screen, if you hold your finger on the lock screen and move 1 pixel to the left, the camera module starts up even if you don't finish your swipe to camera gesture.
Non-preloaded apps can't access your camera feed unless they are open in the foreground (zero days aside, but you're probably not interesting enough to burn one on).
I put all of my apps into category folders at the top row, so I can see my background photo that I really enjoy. Once you do this for long enough, it is jarring to see the chaotic placement of app icons all over the screen on most people's devices.
Also I never use the camera app icon, I swipe left from the lock screen 99% of the time, and the remaining 1% is from things like auth apps opening it to scan QR codes for new accounts, etc.
> if you hover your finger over the Camera app icon without actually opening the app, the camera starts operating iOS 18.3, cannot recreate this. If I long-press the icon then yeah obviously it triggers, but just “hovering” does nothing for me. In addition, if I put my finger on the camera app icon and then swipe pages it doesn’t trigger the dot either. Is this a new thing in 26.x?
Edit: actually there is a timing sweet spot on the swiping that I can get to do it, but still nothing with just pure hovering
I couldn’t get it to trigger until I opened the camera app and made sure to switch to the front facing camera before exiting. After doing that I was able to consistently trigger the indicator when swiping across and long-pressing the icon.
EDIT: it also only seems to happen if the camera icon is on one of your Home Screen pages. I haven’t been able to reproduce the behavior when swiping across the icon while in the App Library. Wonder why they decided to do it that way? Do most people keep a camera icon on their Home Screen? That would be baffling to me. Why clutter your Home Screen when you can so easily access the camera from the lock screen or by using the physical camera button on newer iPhones?
Because it's on the homescreen in the default layout and a large number of people don't change their defaults?
> Why clutter your Home Screen when you can so easily access the camera from the lock screen
Half the time since updating to iOS 26 on my 13 mini, if I try to activate the camera from the lock screen the app opens but the camera fails to start and the view just stays black, and then I have to exit and try again. It's quite annoying. This does not happen with the camera app after unlocking the phone.
Do you also have the slow-motion bug where every second or so a frame or two gets dropped, resulting in stutters in the video?
Hmm, I don't think so, but I do get the awful indoor lighting flicker when shooting slow-mo at 240fps that completely ruins indoor videos, and it really seems like Apple could just fix that if they cared at all.
I’m pretty sure that’s because the lights are actually flickering. The lights are the issue not the camera.
Rooms with these lights give me migraines. I can always tell when lights in a room are like that, and I use the 240hz slow motion on my phone to double check or figure out which specific lights are the issue.
I hate these lights and I don’t understand why places use them.
> I’m pretty sure that’s because the lights are actually flickering
They are, but the camera stack should be detecting and compensating for that - it's pretty easy to detect, since it should be a fixed 50/60Hz depending on geographic location. You typically have to implement this filtering on all manner of light sensors.
Um. 240 is a multiple of 60.
> Why clutter your Home Screen when you can so easily access the camera from the lock screen
Because if using the phone then you need to access the lock screen to use the camera?
That means hitting the power button twice (slowly so you don’t trigger the wallet) and then a long press on the camera.
Alternatively it’s just a swipe and a tap if it’s on the home screen.
I swipe down to see the notifications/lock screen, then right to access the camera.
sure, but with typical one-handed operation you cant reach the top of the screen to swipe down.
Fair enough, but then I can think of an even better place to put the icon: the control center that is a single swipe away from any screen in the OS. This is all moot in newer iPhones tho, as the physical camera button in the lower right is the easiest and fastest way to get to the camera.
Anyhow, this is all just personal preference, of course. Anyone is free to put a camera icon anywhere they please. I just personally can’t stand clutter in my home or lock screens, so I tend to keep the number of apps there to a minimum and access everything else either via Spotlight or Control Center widgets.
Yeah, control centre also works, but that requires using 2 hands to do comfortably.
No issue making this happen on IOS 26. Camera was lower left icon exactly where I touch go swipe, holding phone in left hand.Put finger down and swiped, green light on. Moved it to the right side.
I was under the impression that sophisticated iOS malware like Pegasus can access the camera without turning on the dot. This is certainly possible on MacOS.
Are you sure about this for Macs? My understanding of recentish models is that the power for the camera passes through the light, so it’s impossible to turn on the camera without the light.
I inadvertently trigger the camera all the time, perhaps due to sweaty hands. Thank you.
You saved me from wiping my phone this morning - thanks. I kept seeing the dot when but the privacy report only said "camera". This gives me a lot of reassurance.
Anyone else find that the iPhone camera app crashes about half the time these days? It's killing me...
More annoying is that it's really difficult for me to unlock the phone with the side button without activating Siri. Seems like there's often a lag when waking the phone that causes a long press to be detected even with a short press.
Wait, iphones now support detection of finger hover? I remember hearing about iOS introducing software support for this, presumably for when the hardware can catch up. But never heard of it actually being implemented.
I think capacitive touchscreens always did? It was never reliable enough or something. The panels generate scanned strength maps for the whole displays. Values for locations that aren't being touched aren't zeroes.
Yes, but it’s a couple mm at most and not exposed as a public API.
Of course not. Only tapping. But the camera hardware gets booted up as soon as you tap the icon, without waiting to see if the tap is a swipe, and without waiting for you to lift your finger (which is when other apps would open).
> Of course not
Actually of course yes, every capacitive touchscreen has basic hover capabilities in some form, it’s just a fairly narrow range (a few mm at most) and not exposed as a public API.
There's an API in iOS/iPadOS named UIHoverGestureRecognizer, but it only detects hover from cursors and from the Apple Pencil. The Apple Pencil hover is neat and actual "hover" detection in the way you're thinking; it can be detected up to 12mm away from the screen. But right now there's no actual detection for finger hover, even though Apple patented a technique for it almost 10 years ago.
I think this is more of an Apple specific hack to get latency down; boot the cameras up as early as possible.
Can third party apps use this to speed up their use of camera hardware too?
“Hover” seems to be causing some confusion. It’s more of a “shallow” press. Like the opposite of “pressing into” when 3D Touch was a thing
Yes, maybe hover wasn't the best word.
touch + swipe away to cancel app opening
Hovering does not do anything. They mean pressing and dragging your finger away from the icon.
>Because hovering a finger on the Camera app icon is enough,
Like others I can't get this replicated either.
And even if I did not sure I'd care. My iphone has so much information on me already an extra 500ms of camera on seems pretty immaterial compared to other risks (like tracker in your pocket 24/7, constantly leaking info to god knows what app's servers etc)
I wasn't clear about what I meant by hovering: you touch the icon but then you move your finger somewhere else so the app never gets opened. I've edited the post to make this clearer.
I think you're missing the point of the post, which I actually also initially missed based on the misleading title. The author isn't saying that the camera app activating the camera and green light is a problem. The author is saying that he's unknowingly activating the camera app by simply touching the app icon, which in turn activates the green light and makes him think something nefarious is going on. However, this is a false positive that can contribute to alert fatigue and cause users to entirely ignore the green light.
I think it’s so smart of them to do this to improve UX, which I really care about. You can just tell they had a creative workshop around optimizing camera startup time (which is super important to optimize and one of the many reasons I own an iPhone!).
I’m happy to see them being so open about it in the privacy report. It shows that it’s a real priority for them: It would’ve been easier to hide this as an implementation detail and not have people wonder about it. Another big reason to own an iPhone.
However, it is yet another example of them making full use of owning the platform in ways I assume other players can’t. The Apple camera app will always start faster than others, which is a loss for customization and competition.
Yeah but also if they did make that an API imagine apps abusing it… instagram posts abusing HDR is bad enough as it is lol
Beyond hover detection causing the app to preload (TIL that's apparently a thing? Can anyone confirm?), another case I've seen is trying to slide up to unlock but accidentally triggering the lock screen camera for a millisecond or two, which also causes the indicator to linger for a few seconds.
edit: Is this actual "hover without touching screen", which is what I was shocked about, or is this more like "finger passes over the icon while swiping between pages"?
Trying to decide whether I'm taken aback more at the green dot when touching the camera icon during a swipe, or at my own failure to notice it before …
When i think about it, I would be absolutely terrified by smartphone cameras. Think laptop accessories that cover the webcam - haven't seen any of those for smartphones. Yet we trust a green dot with all our heart nowadays. Back in the day when cameras started showing up on mobile phones there were even versions of popular business feature phones that lacked the camera (Nokia E51 if i recall correctly), probably triggered by requirements of clients with strict information security standards.
It seems we all learned to stop worrying and love the cameras.
>haven't seen any of those for smartphones
Many phone cases do. Under the idea that you're protecting the camera, but it blocks it none the less.
Some industries still require camera-less phones, and there are companies who make them, or more interestingly, modify existing iphones!
Here's one vendor https://noncam.com/
Can't they just sell a case that can be locked and covers the camera holes?
And yet if you have your phone on you, you can still record everything that was said…
My wife worked in a facility that didn't allow phone cameras. You had to check it in anytime you went into one of the secure areas or prove you had one of their phones that had the camera disabled if you were important enough to require being contactable. While I'm sure one or more of the thousands of employees managed to leak some valuable info through conversations, pictures would have been worth 1000x as much if not more.
I'd be far more worried about an ability for 3rd parties to record audio at any moment than for them to be able to record video of what's likely my pocket or desk surface at any given moment.
Same concern of many I have with laptops and theoretical webcam recording. Theres far worse things they could be stealthily doing.
You trust the green dot with your heart simply because they wired it in series with the camera. Can’t be bypassed unless you opened the device and bypassed the green light. This is why people with webcam covers on macbooks are fools: they fear and yet they do not care to understand what it is they fear to see if it is actually worth fearing.
So anyways, here's a somewhat memorable incident of people doing the thing you claim is impossible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISeeYou
ISeeYou went well beyond turning off the light, it also came with arbitrary code execution: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity14/technical...
The "hack" baddies do is to only activate it for 30ms or so, so there's a chance you'll miss the green light.
The problem is that apparently, often enough that is just not the case.
On laptops, the LED is not powered with the camera, but controlled by it. And on smartphones, if it's a green dot on the display it can obviously be bypassed in different ways given the right vulnerabilities.
Also, aside from that, your condescending attitude is frustrating.
There are so many things that would have to go wrong for a third party app to surreptitiously activate your camera and pick up images in the background on iOS, this is tin foil hat level concern.
It’s also hilarious how many people worry about covering up their camera on the laptop not thinking that the microphone can pick up much more information in the surrounding area - again worrying about the wrong thing.
Also see, not using biometric security because in the US, police can’t legally make you give up your password - even though police are not above rubber hose decryption, judges hold people in contempt indefinitely and iPhone and Android phones are laughable insecure after first unlock after rebooting your phone.
>It’s also hilarious how many people worry about covering up their camera on the laptop not thinking that the microphone can pick up much more information in the surrounding area - again worrying about the wrong thing.
Or they worry about the right thing, its just not what you worry about.
You ever see The Accountant? That scene where he goes home and ups the stimulation to 13/10? I live my life in that world. Good luck getting any useful intel from my phone's microphone.
https://youtu.be/Mb8krWbv1CI?t=62
Phone camera covers have been available for years.
The absolute best phone-camera-wise was the SNAFU in the past where every access to the camera would turn the green light on... Except for one obscure company that happened to have a free pass. I don't remember the details and won't bother to check but it went a bit like this: "Jack's Petrolhead Garage is the only company in the world that can turn the phone's camera on WITHOUT the green light turning on". Some people eventually found out about this and it made headlines.
Then of course the damage control started --and those always turning a blind eye to the state's wrongdoings are surely going to still damage control this--: "oh but Jack is the nephew of the cousin of that engineer at this company and historically they helped us write one of the first app using the camera".
Or whatever bullshit nonsense explanation they came up with.
If you ask me: Jack's Petrolhead Garage (name I made up) was a NSA front and you can shove your excuses where the light doesn't shine.