I’m currently running with iOS/iPadOS 14.1, which was released last week. Before that latest update I was having issues with screen brightness and color across all my devices. I would sit looking at the device and see the brightness slowly increase, then slowly decrease, or else watch the hue shift from warm to cool and back again. Or both at the same time. That’s part of the feature set, folks.
I got so tired of it, so I went looking for all the ways to turn it off and just set my own screen brightness. First I went into Display and Brightness and turned off True Tone. That got rid of the crazy hue shifting. Then I had to go hunting further through Settings for more…
I finally stumbled upon Accessibility | Display and Text Size and made sure everything there was off. What surprised me is that Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast were both enabled. I know I never touched those once, because it’s under Accessibility, and supposedly it’s for folks who actually need help accessing their iPhone. Once I disabled those, the look on my iPhone in particular matched what I used to get right up to the iPhone 8 and its iOS version, 11. The overall look when weird after that, which I know isn’t quite the technical term you’d like to read. But it was usable, I was busy, so I lived with the weirdness.
You’d think by now I would have nailed it all, but no, there’s one more setting which I’ll document here. At the bottom of Display and Text Size is Auto-Brightness. You have to turn that off as well. Once that’s all done, then the screen is just a screen, not some magic marketing checkbox.
The controls for controlling these “features” are all over the place in Settings. Silly me, I would have thought Auto-Brightness would be in Display & Brightness, not two levels down in Accessibility | Display and Text Size. Only a sadistic asshole Apple developer would design and implement it that way.
Now, with the latest version of iOS, all I have to do is swipe down from the upper left corner to get a control panel with the brightness widget, and set the screen brightness to a level I like. It really isn’t that hard to do, folks. The automagic capability in iOS is busted in my not-so-humble-opinion. I’m thankful that I can disable all that crap and do it on my own. Right now, I have screen brightness level set between a third and a half of the slider.
Radarwitch
That kind of behaviour from a display would have me paranoid about my eyesight.
What idiot thought it was a good idea to have the brightness and colour change with no input? It’s one thing to dim down after a certain amount of time or due to the ambient light levels. Quite another to randomly fluctuate for no reason.
I’m glad I don’t have modern technology like that!
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Believe it or not, the iPhone is supposed to be using the forward-facing sensors that are a part of the cluster in the notch. It was never this bad before now, or this noticeable. There’s more bugs in this now than I think I’ve ever encountered. And I good and damn pissed off about it because I’ve spent more on this particular model than on any other before it. It’s one damn good reason I didn’t pre-enroll for the iPhone 12. I’ve also had to do the equivalent on my Macs, especially both of my Pros.
I am in no mood to put up with anybody’s expensive yet shitty software. That includes everybody, so don’t preach to me about Microsoft. Apple may be bad, but Microsoft is worse.
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No argument here. I use primitive Linux, which at least does what you tell it to most of the time. Whenever the computer thinks it is smarter than the user there will be problems.
And couldn’t they try this equipment out before dumping it on an unsuspecting public? I sometimes wonder if it makes Alpha testing, never mind Beta.
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