Some iPhone 16 Professional house owners are complaining that their brand-new and intensely costly handsets are failing to attain one among their most simple features: responding accurately to touchscreen gestures. Sure actions seem like setting off the touch-rejection algorithm, inflicting the display to reject all or almost all legitimate faucets and swipes for a brief time frame.
The problem could be associated to the brand new Digicam Management function. As one Redditor explains, “If one’s skin accidentally touches the area next to the new Camera Control button first, the whole screen becomes unresponsive until released, except for the home bar.” The following habits varies in accordance with context, however is persistently obstructive: no tapping or swiping in Settings, no swiping on the house web page though tapping into apps could also be doable.
The affected Redditor provides that the zone round Digicam Management “is the only area that causes the issue,” however that doesn’t fairly observe with the expertise of different customers. One commenter on that very thread claims to have discovered an identical “dead spot” on the left-hand facet of the telephone, and 9to5Mac stories that the bug has been noticed on all 4 edges.
It ought to be famous, nevertheless, that not each unit is affected. Quite a few respondents to the Reddit thread mentioned they couldn’t reproduce the issue; many extra mentioned they might, however solely with issue, notably when utilizing a case. Different customers have been seemingly in a position to replicate the problem with older fashions, however these cases have been much less widespread.
What appears to be occurring is customers are by accident triggering the iPhone’s palm- or touch-rejection system. This is a crucial factor of a touchscreen interface that lets the gadget ignore pores and skin contact from the arms which might be holding it relatively than making an attempt to manage it. However on this case, we’re getting false positives and it’s rejecting legitimate touches. 9to5Mac additional theorizes that the 16 Professional’s particularly skinny display bezels could also be partially accountable as a result of it will result in extra pores and skin contact with the energetic display.
Regardless of the doable involvement of the bezel design in triggering the issue, the excellent news is that it appears to be essentially a software program relatively than a {hardware} drawback, which ought to make it simpler to repair in a customary iOS 18.0.1 replace. As soon as Apple has recognized the issue and provide you with an answer, customers can merely set up a software program replace; they gained’t should take their handsets right into a restore store or ship them again to get replaced.
Nevertheless, Apple has not but publicly acknowledged that the issue exists, not to mention provide you with an answer, so the reply for now could also be to be affected person. And, in fact, don’t maintain it that manner.