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.
Wouldn't surprise me either. I know a guy who worked at Apple on iOS perf and the one time he was telling me about it years ago, it was "camera app doesn't start fast enough, so we reworked memory management". Apple really cares about the camera.
I bet this is in the new version 26. That version is so garbage and I regret updating. 95% of the time, when I open the phone, it doesnt unlock my phone with face and I have to enter PIN. Sometimes I cant take photos also. In the browser, when I touch the address field nothing happens and I can go on and on and on. Just leave the shit as is, people. Its like if I have a screwdriver in my workshot and every other month, when I come back to use it, you change some bullshit, so I have to operate it slightly different. Fuck that
I think ChatGPT has a similar feature. I was amazed how the reply starts coming in literally the moment I press enter. As far as I can tell that is only possible if all the previous tokens I submitted have already been processed. So when I actually submit the message, it only needs to update the inner state by one more token.
i.e. I think it's sending my message to the server continuously, and updating the GPU state with each token (chunk of text) that comes in.
Or maybe their set up is just that good and doesn't actually need any tricks or optimizations? Either way that's very impressive.
> I think it's sending my message to the server continuously
It is, at least I see it for the first message when starting a new chat. If you open the network tools and type, you can see the text being sent to the servers on every character.
Source, from spending too much time analysing the network calls in ChatGPT to keep using mini models in a free account.
The 'flash' / no or low-thinking versions of those models are crazy fast. We often receive full response (not just first token) in less than 1 second via API.
IIRC, apple has a patent from years ago for keeping a camera module in a semi-active mode when the phone isn't entirely idle to make starting it faster.
I'm at the point where I want a pop-up for every time my phone wants to use location/camera/mic/contacts. Or at least more options to require this for individual system services/apps.
Also, while we are at it, why can't I disable network access entirely for some apps? If I have a game that doesn't need the internet then it doesn't need the internet and I don't want it to have access to the internet, ever. I have been putting my phone in airplane mode just to use some of the apps and not have them phone home. This is a clearly missing (intentionally not added?) privacy feature.
> why can't I disable network access entirely for some apps
Agreed, the only reason we don’t have a streamlined version of Little Snitch (very flexible network monitor) built in to the OS is that it’d destroy billions of revenue for the advertising industry.
About 5 years ago I purged as many apps as I could. I still have some I need for my job, especially on my work-issued iPhone, but excluding those apps I have exactly 5 apps on my phone. Everything has a website.
I've heard that native apps are more secure than webapps, but in my experience Firefox is a more reliable steward of security, and App permissions are too obscure to really understand: it is harder to make a malicious webapp than it is to make a malicious native app. Is that a fair statement?
I avoid ad supported apps, so if those devs move to companies that I support, it might actually help me?
If it damages the the OS, that’s a problem for me on a Mac/ios but not so much with Ubuntu.
It’s not that long ago that I was paying for OS updates (that seems wild, I had to go and check). If it went back to that and I had no ads, it would be a straight win.
> Also, while we are at it, why can't I disable network access entirely for some apps?
This is possible in GrapheneOS and is super nice. I use a keyboard app that I like but disable network access to ensure that it doesn't send private data anywhere.
It's also possible in LineageOS and its derivatives.
But it's not very useful in practice: if an application doesn't need networking for its core functionality, then there usually is an open-source equivalent that does not use the network in the first place. The few applications that lack a good open-source equivalent (public transportation, proprietary messaging protocols, banking) don't do anything useful without network access.
Being able to block network access gives me peace of mind regardless if the app is proprietary or open source. Humans are fallible and life can get in the way (maybe the app has old dependecies with vulnerabilities, or any other random thing that I don't want). Being able to set the permissions I want only has upsides.
What would be more useful, however, would be the ability to selectively block network connections: for example, to allow the public transportation app to access its API endpoint, but not the advertising and tracking endpoints. I don't think LineageOS allows that, and I don't know if Graphene does.
> I'm at the point where I want a pop-up for every time my phone wants to use
I’m in the EU on holiday. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to the damn cookie popup that appears on every single site. Having it for apps wouldn’t seem likely to be more intrusive.
FWIW: Me too. I want 100% transparency and I have no problem clicking a dialog every single time. My credit card company sends me a lot of alerts and I have no issue spending 5 seconds skimming an email if it means not getting scammed.
> why can't I disable network access entirely for some apps
Apple kind of do this in China. Each app on Chinese iPhone needs to ask for permission when they access WiFi for the first time. Combine with cellular blocking, you can effectively block internet access for an app.
I hid the Camera app icon entirely and instead I get to the camera from the quick-access menu I get by swiping down from the top-right corner. (I think Apple calls this the Control Center.)
I did this so that using the Camera only takes one swipe (down) no matter what screen I'm on.
I just confirmed that the Control Center icon also lights up the green dot at first touch. However, incidental touches are probably more rare and unlikely in this menu.
While we're talking about silly(?) iOS design decisions, the one I can't get over is allowing users to change lock screen timeout without pin/faceid via Settings > Display & Brightness > Auto-lock. This should really be under Face ID & Passcode or Privacy & Security.
From a phone getting taken from your hand perspective, this is the first thing they will change.
> 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.
I didn't say it wasn't. I said I bet that Apple, the company that can zero-shot high resolution synthetic 3D views from flat photos, could make the flicker not show in the video if they tried so that slow motion videos shot indoors aren't completely ruined by AC flicker.
> 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.
It’s not just about matching the frequency but also the phase.
This is easier when your lights are all in phase and also in a single frequency, but you might also have bulbs that are at different frequencies (120 vs 60) or electric hookups that go out of phase.
It’s a very tricky problem to solve and to the best of my knowledge, nobody truly has. Film lights do clever and expensive tricks to match phase but that’s not feasible in a domestic setup.
Yes, so you either get a strobe on/strobe off every two frames if you're in 60 Hz country, or a slower crawling flicker in 50 Hz land. Migraine-inducing either way. Also, your phone won't shutter at exactly 60.00/50.00 Hz (mains freq. is pretty stable, usually stable to at least the first decimal) so you'll see a jittered, jumpy phase drift on top of that.
Yep, and this breaks all sorts of computer vision setups. We had to compensate for it on the cameras that track the Oculus controllers, since folks are often playing under indoor lighting
There are so many bugs in iOS 26 I've personally experienced. I'd believe anything at this point.
I keep opening my phone "favorites" section and it erroneously reports no favorites. They either eventually load after seconds+ or I have to force close to get them to show.
It’s a special mode called secure access. You cannot actually access any existing data from it; but taking camera photos is a primary action that people use their phones for. Why wouldn’t you want to accelerate that?
I suppose. I rarely take photos with my phone. It's really one of the least used features of the device for me. When I activate the camera from the lock screen it's always unintentional and it's an annoyance. It would be nice to at least have the option to disable that.
Edit: I discovered that in iOS 26 you can disable the "swipe" activation of the camera on the lock screen. I've done that and it should remove one of my major annoyances with the phone.
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.
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).
Wild how a single poor word choice can derail so much of HN's comments into the kind of nit-picking we're seeing here. Thanks for correcting! We'll probably have much better comments here because of it.
A while ago, I moved everything on my iPhone home screen to screen 2 (and everything on screen 2 to screen 3, etc.) and emptied the quick access bar at the bottom (no phone app, msg app - just an empty box). There are zero icons (literally nothing) on my home screen except the wallpaper. One of the best things I've ever done on my iPhone.
I felt like as soon as I opened my phone, everything on the home screen was clamoring for my attention: new text messages, new emails, new calls, new reminders, alerts, alerts alerts.
Now, when I open my phone, I get a peaceful empty screen. If I scroll right, I can see the ocean of alerts (if that's what I'm ready to tackle) or I can swipe left to a screen with a few shortcuts for phone or browser (Orion).
In short, I put the chaos in a box that I only open when I want to. Might sound trite but it's made a big difference. I also turned off the thing that opens the phone as soon as I pick it up. Now, half the time I pick it up, I look at, decide I can live without all the chaos and put it back in my pocket.
I guess my orig post triggered because with a blank home screen, I can't accidentally activate the phone camera.
An alternate strategy is to turn off most of those alerts. When I open my home screen I see a bunch of icons, but only two of them are allowed to show the little red circle with a number in it: Phone and Messages. I picked those since I am habitually up to date on them. So the number is usually quite low, usually below 5.
I also do not allow most apps to put banners on the screen (locked or unlocked), or beep, or buzz the phone. Almost all my apps have notifications turned off completely. If I want to know the status of my email, I open the email app. If I want to see what's new in Instagram, I open Instagram. Etc.
But the point is, those checks happen on my schedule, not when I'm prompted.
I don't have the camera app in my app grid, but sometimes I see the green dot and have no idea what is triggering it. I even disabled the camera permission for all apps and started to turn it on from scratch only for apps I find necessary, but didn't know what was triggering it.
I am not why this logging thingy isn't enabled by default, but I am very happy it's possible to turn it on.
Oh... You're totally right. I was just able to reproduce this.
Maybe that's the reason I sometimes get a green dot when I am unlocking my phone.
Tyvm for sharing this. IIRC, it's possible to change the camera icon in the lock screen to something else. Since I never use this button (I am one of those weirdos that use the camera control button instead), I think I'll change to something else.
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.
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.
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.
I doubt it - Apple has a bad habit of putting in specific behaviors for certain home screen icons in Springboard (consider the clock and calendar icons) which are tied to the app identity but executed by Springboard.
I would love it is my phone and laptop had hardware switches that were on the power or data lines for the camera and microphone, it's all well and good the software telling me the things aren't on but unless it's open source I can't verify that. With hardware switches someone could at least disassemble the device to ensure they were actually effective, and a software bug couldn't get around the fact that the microphone doesn't have power if the switch is open.
Being open source is technically not required to verify this. It’s possible to prove or disprove security claims by reverse engineering, and iOS specifically is already a popular target for professional/academic RE.
Of course, a hardware switch is always more secure.
I think iOS 26 is also just broken when it comes to the indicator, sometimes I’ve quit the Camera app and I’ve noticed the indicator will stay in use whenever I’m on Springboard. Not sure what they did this year to break it :/
If it's not a bug, then that's an information for you that the Camera is being used by whatever process is going on out there. Maybe if someone chimes in if they have knowledge about the green dot? Is it part of the OS as an app/process or does it have a parallel system independent of apps running?
When I dismiss the camera app, I still see green dot for a bit, then it switches to orange (microphone?) before it disappears completely. The little enclave is cute but *OS 26 has been so full of bugs that can you really say all this is working safely and as intended?
Apple’s new Secure Indicator Light (SIL) mechanism. When using the microphone or camera, the corresponding indicator dot is effectively rendered in hardware, making it a lot less likely that any malware or user space app would be able to access those sensors without the user’s knowledge.
If this mechanism isn't working as intended, Apple pays $100,000 to $2,000,000 bounty for bugs that breach security boundaries which protect sensitive user data or sandboxes.
That's cool but someone needs to find said bugs and Apple is not exactly open for audit. Given the critical nature of smartphones, I think corps of this magnitude should be subject to oversight and clear and transparent external evaluation of such sensitive systems.
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.
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.
Also affects the camera icon on the Lock Screen (bottom right). It also affects a partial left swipe gesture too which is very easy to do when the screen is touched
>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.
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 …
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.
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.
That may have been possible and even easy on older hardware but modern Apple hardware makes this way more of a pain in the ass. They have a whole separate hypervisor (SPTM), kernel, and userland running in a higher set of guarded privilege levels from the standard ARM exception levels.
Compromising the camera dot on modern iOS requires compromising SPTM, which is equivalent to a full jailbreak. Most modern iOS spyware doesn't actually go as far as that, it just does enough exploitation to get the data they want.
None of this applies to macOS, which doesn't use SPTM, because the whole point of SPTM is to enforce iOS code signing and lockdown rules.
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.
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.
when i go into secure zone at factory, they cover our phone camera lens with a piece of sticker. It was quite trouble some because my phone has 5 camera(S21U). The sticker is similar to the warannty sticker you find on electronic device, so if you try to remove they will know.
But the sticker seem generic, so i bet someone can prepare it before hand if they really want.
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.
The API calls to turn on the camera, wait for + grab the first frame, and terminate it, are 1) non timing deterministic and 2) always take more than 30ms so that’s a pretty bad “hack”
Lol it's like calling people taking vaccine is a fool. The indicator light only tell you that you have been compromised, they do not prevent that malware from running at all. And when the light is turned on, the hacker will already have hundreds pictured of you(60 fps is 60 frames per second after all)
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.
If you use your phone and take photos with it, then what difference does it make that it uses the camera when you unlock it? If your phone is compromised, you're already cooked.
I have noticed it but I am bit split on this: I'd rather have this indicator on every time the camera is activated in anyway rather than Apple making it more "efficient" by hiding whatever activity is happening with the camera.
It's a signal that I eventually got used to and the fact that it makes me alert for even a couple of seconds, I consider that a plus.
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.
You got a source? Because th green light isn’t controlled by software. The LED is directly wired to the camera power. You cannot use the camera without the little green light turning on.
> Because th green light isn’t controlled by software. The LED is directly wired to the camera power.
You got a source for that? Or a clarification about which iphone version you are talking about? Because on my iphone 15 the green indicator light next to the camera is not an LED but a UI element on the screen. Source: I put my phone under a microscope just now and can see the individual pixels in this supposed "LED". Happy to provide the image if interested.
reply