> 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
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.
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"?
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.
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.
Even zuck doesn’t understand this. There are shots of him out there with macbooks that have that circuit setup with a piece of tape still. Even if it was a risk, what about the mic there zuck? Stuffed with beeswax already?
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)
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.
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 …
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.
>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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadEdit: actually there is a timing sweet spot on the swiping that I can get to do it, but still nothing with just pure hovering
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".
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"?
It seems we all learned to stop worrying and love the cameras.
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.
So you think it's fine if someone accidentally activates the camera, as long as they know about it?
All it takes is an accidental click on "Video" during a teams call in the bathroom, and you will quickly discover the utility of a cover.
Same concern of many I have with laptops and theoretical webcam recording. Theres far worse things they could be stealthily doing.
Many phone cases do. Under the idea that you're protecting the camera, but it blocks it none the less.
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
From a phone getting taken from your hand perspective, this is the first thing they will change.
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.