7 Weird iPhone Issues Nobody Mentions!

Issues That’ll Make You Say, “Wait… mine does that too!”

Photo by Sam Grozyan on Unsplash

After nine years of owning an iPhone, I noticed issues that aren’t mentioned or barely touched on in iPhone reviews.

I will explain what they are, how they affect the user experience, and how Apple can fix some of them in their next iPhones.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

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1. The Blinding Front Flash Light

Eyes squint after every selfie

I’ve taken thousands of selfies since purchasing my first iPhone. It features a great function where the entire screen becomes white and bright, serving as a temporary flashlight for the front camera.

However, it’s blinding as the brightness is too sudden and too much. My eyes squint, which ruins a lot of selfie images.

I thought maybe this is my natural reaction to flashlights, but I don’t have the same reaction when using the rear camera.

Maybe if there were a slider in the settings app to adjust the intensity and duration, it would solve this issue.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

2. Swipe to Unlock Is Unreliable

It often doesn’t register touches, and you have to swipe twice

The combination of iOS and Apple’s hardware creates a semi-stable experience.

Such stability isn’t reliable and often causes unpredictable results.

It’s quite often when I try to unlock my iPhone or disable a timer, and the touchscreen doesn’t register touch.

FaceID also frequently fails to recognise my face, locking my device, forcing me to enter the passcode; Apple needs to stabilise iOS.

Photo by Nick Abrams on Unsplash

3. iPhone Gets Slow and Fast for No Reason

Perhaps iOS needs more optimisation

On most Apple devices, except Apple Silicon Macs, I experienced sudden bursts of performance.

Sometimes it happens when my internet is fast, sometimes it doesn’t.

I cannot prove whether a good internet makes or breaks the performance, but I think a good internet is key to a good overall experience in parts of the OS that don’t require being online.

Whatever the case, sometimes my iPhone is too responsive, where it opens apps like it’s a brand new phone. But sometimes it’s slow and laggy.

I had performance issues with all iOS updates on my iPhones and iPads. On my latest iPhone, despite the A17 Pro chip, which is a powerhouse, the experience is similar.

I believe it’s an optimisation issue that Apple can fix. Sometimes, reopening the Control Centre a couple of times improves the performance of navigating the home screen experience.

Let me know if you experience this issue and how you resolve it in the response section of this article. I’m genuinely curious to discover if other people face this problem.

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4. iPhone Unintentionally Takes Photos & Videos

Tens of pocket photos/videos appear in the Photos app!

Some people told me about pocket photos when we talked about iPhone issues, but I haven’t read much about it online.

There are moments when your iPhone unintentionally opens the camera app and starts taking photos or videos of your pocket.

I’ve noticed it more on iOS 18, and less on iOS 26, but it’s still an issue where the touchscreen registers unintentional touches.

On iOS 26, you can fix this problem by toggling off the following:

Settings → Camera → Lock Screen Swipe to Open Camera

Photo by Kouji Tsuru on Unsplash

5. The Flashlight Turns On In Your Pocket

A waste of battery when the flashlight is on for a long time

At work, I took out my phone to place it on the desk, then I realised the flashlight was on, and one of my coworkers said, “Are you recording the meeting?”

I had to explain that I wasn't, and the iPhone turned on the flashlight on its own.

Similar to the camera bug, iOS unintentionally registers touch when you place the iPhone in your pocket.

Maybe Apple could fix this issue by coding an algorithm that detects the phone is upside down so that iOS stops registering touches briefly.

This issue affects the battery life and produces heat in the pocket.

Photo by Josh Power on Unsplash

6. Quality Photos Without Noise isn’t a thing on Smartphones

The small phone lens won’t let much light in

I have had iPhones for around a decade now, and I can say iPhones produce great images due to the ISP and camera upgrades since 2020.

I have taken many quality photos on my iPhone 12 Mini, 15 Pro, and even on an iPad Pro 4th gen.

Smartphones, generally, take great photos, yet their photos look good only during daylight with sufficient light coming through their smart lenses.

If you take night photos or even images during the dawn, you’ll notice a significant quality decrease in your photos.

The noise, lesser details, blurry shots, all happen because of physics!

The iPhone (even all smartphones) have great small lenses due to the engineering channels while designing a smartphone.

So, product designers and engineers have so much space to work with when designing the layout for a smartphone camera.

The result is a small lens that can let only a certain amount of light, which often results in blurry, soft, and noisy images.

The image signal processor can do so much to correct colours, sharpen the details, and reduce noise, but it’s still a phone photo of a small lens.

Apple could increase the size of their lenses, but that would require significant rethinking of the smartphone design with its unique challenges.

Maybe this is why, year after year, we notice larger lenses in smartphones.

Unfortunately, the price to pay is an uneven surface level of the backside of your iPhone, which produces wobbles when placed on a desk or a flat surface.

Companies that build the camera lens have to compensate for the lack of a larger lens.

This forces smartphone manufacturers to use AI, machine learning, and some other tricks to modify images, making them look artificial.

Photo by Casey Chae on Unsplash

7. The selfie camera produces low-quality images

No matter how well they make, they still produce bad photos

My last issue with iPhones for this article is the low quality of the front camera.

The images look even softer, noisier and darker than the rear cameras, as the front camera has an even smaller lens with a lower number of megapixels.

The iPhone 17 series fixed the orientation issue of selfie photos, which is awesome. But the photos still look low resolution and lack detail.

Maybe Apple could put a larger sensor underneath the display and hide it like how Android phones do, and produce better-looking photos.

The technology isn’t mature enough for Apple to use it, but I’m hopeful that in a couple of years, we could see that happen in our iPhones.

If you have any comments, suggestions, or criticisms, I will be happy to read them in the response section.

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