> 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.

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.

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 …

“Hover” seems to be causing some confusion. It’s more of a “shallow” press. Like the opposite of “pressing into” when 3D Touch was a thing

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.

Hovering does not do anything. They mean pressing and dragging your finger away from the icon.

>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)

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.

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 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.

Anyone else find that the iPhone camera app crashes about half the time these days? It's killing me...

I inadvertently trigger the camera all the time, perhaps due to sweaty hands. Thank you.

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.

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.