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Comment by pirates | Hacker News Reader

> 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

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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.

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.

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.

Um. 240 is a multiple of 60.

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

Mine does this too. I wonder if it’s exclusively an iPhone 13 mini thing because I don’t understand how it shipped.

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.

In don't understand accessing anything from the lock screen. It's locked, nothing should operate.

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.

Not to mention with this feature, I don't have to hand an unlocked phone to a stranger if I want a photo taken.

I have this in iOS 16 so it’s not new (and not fixed it sounds like) sadly.

iPhone 13 regular here, same problem. I reported it repeatedly during the iOS 26 betas but they don’t give a damn.

> 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.

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.

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.

> Do most people keep a camera icon on their Home Screen? That would be baffling to me.

probably. it is a TikTok world after all. or, pretty sure it's on the home screen by default and no one probably bothers to move it.

Because it's on the homescreen in the default layout and a large number of people don't change their defaults?

"Hover" doesn't exist on touchscreen devices, in the physical sense of holding your finger above the screen without touching.

It only exists with a pointer, when you're using some kind of mouse or trackpad.

So it's ambiguous and confusing language. They should have said "when you hold your finger down on".

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.

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