iOS 14 iPhone update - camera not working.

They replaced the camera on the back and it worked but charge $80 even though they could see nothing else wrong with the phone, clearly their fault , a hardware issue due to the update

Apple did this?

I bought the iPhone 11 about a month ago. Installed iOS 14 and back camera started giving issues. However, after turning off and on it would work again. Installed iOS 14.1 today now back camera is still black no matter what I try and flashlight won’t work at all. I’ve tried your suggestion but still doesn’t work. 😔😒

Well the non-working back camera and flashlight that quit working about 13.9.x, and began to intermittently work with 14.0. and 14.0.1 just quit completely again on my iPhone 8.

I went through the soft reboot, hard reboot and will do another restore. Lot a good that’ll do.

But I am not going through the reset where you lose all stored settings. I am not going to got to Apple and let them charge me $80. And I am certainly not buying a new iPhone. I’m getting aggravated enough to think about a Samsung next time, though.

I have an iPhone 8 Plus and same issue started today, just before I had a notification that IOS 14.3 was available.....coincidence????

I updated the software thinking this would fix it and it hasn’t. Tried all the suggestions & still not working properly. Will now only work on zoom x2, makes the sound as if it’s taken a picture but then nothing saves to gallery. Flashlight still won’t work but will work if I put flash on when “taking a picture”. So I know it’s not a fault with my camera and it’s a software issue that Apple have caused!! I’m so annoyed as other than that my phone is perfectly fine, sounds like Apple are trying to force people to upgrade. And if that’s the case I won’t be buying an iPhone again!

Well. My rear camera and flashlight have worked twice over the past 6 updates. They worked for about 45 seconds after 14.3. Then both quit AGAIN simultaneously. Has not worked since.

Saw some comment about “it’s the hardware”. That’s baloney. This is some sort of “whack a mole” software bug that’s affecting some chip sets and not others. IOS is a massively complex OS that has leaks and bugs that only non-linearly manifest themselves depending on what apps are in memory, how long iPhone has been up, etc..

The same thing is happening to me on an iPhone 7 after updating to 14.4. In case any Apple engineer wants to try to figure this out, I shared my phone analytics & a video of my screen (showing what happens when I try to take a picture). The analytics & data are currently being analyzed by Apple.

Summary:

The camera (video and pictures) do not work. The camera is blurry and/or frozen. The microphone is also not working & I can’t hear anything when making or receiving calls. My camera DOES work in third party apps like Facebook & Instagram.

My iPhone 7 passed all hardware tests at the Apple store in Trumbull, CT, so this is definitely a software issue. Even after my phone was wiped & Apple did a clean install of 14.4, the problem came back within five minutes.

Turning off NFC tag reader doesn’t help. Turning off Voice Over doesn’t help. Hopefully Apple can figure this out soon.

[Personal Information Edited by Moderator]

There is nothing inherently wrong with 14.4 on iphone 7. I use mine all the time. Camera is great. Whatsapp, zoom, facetime all work. Photos are as good as my Nikon D5000.

You have already tried the clean install which suggests hardware failing. You can wait til 14.5 which is coming soon but in my opinon your phone camera has failed.

It’s not hardware related. You must not have read my entire post. My camera works in 3rd party apps, including Facebook, Instagram, & photo apps. Also, my phone passed all hardware checks at the Apple store. This is a software issue & it happened again after my phone was wiped & Apple did a clean instal of 14.4 at their Trumbull, CT store. The problem came back after 5 minutes. The camera and microphone were working right after the re-install, but not for long.

I have given up. Occasional flashlight and rear camera. It’s clear that Apple has no idea how to provide a systematic fix. iOS is too complex and there are too many subtle chip set variations that have apparently put us in this situation. Apple is playing wack-a-mole bug fixing.

I’m telling you, it was never fixed. I don’t see a single person here who said it was fixed for them. Can you show where Apple said or did anything about this?

After multiple attempts with Apple support including wiping/reinstalling my phone to factory default settings and no improvement, I gave up and dropped $1,400 for a new iPhone. What could I do? My phone was broken, I needed a working phone, and it’s been 6 months without even an acknowledgement or statement from Apple that I’ve seen.

Support gave me that Apple customer feedback page you gave. That page has got to receive a million messages from crackpots with user errors. It does not look very promising that anyone important enough in Apple would ever see the message, nor would you know if they had or hadn’t. It was disappointing that there didn’t seem to be any route for Apple support to escalate repeated chronic problems to higher tiers that could consider software update flaws.

At least two threads about camera problems and camera “black screens” after IOS 14 updates were created on 9/17/2020 — the day after the release of IOS 14 on 9/16/2020.

Apple threads 251802549 and 251803518, for example, show 6800 and 1400 “Me Too” clicks in those articles. What kind of problem could have caused cameras to become non-responsive (with a black screen) on that many iPhones in such a relatively short period of time, coinciding with IOS 14.x update releases?

On my phone, if you hold any photo button down long enough, it will eventually take the photo, suggesting it’s really a performance problem. I also noticed that once the the haptics — the vibration of the iPhone 7 fake home button — stopped working until the next reboot. It behaves like perhaps an issue with a memory leak or resources being consumed and not released.

For me, these problems started around the time the IOS update changed the setting so that inbound call notifications now appear as a banner instead of full screen. I’ve read that this banner feature was first added with IOS 14, but IOS 14.3 or 14.4 seems to have changed the default setting on my phone to the new banner, coinciding with the problems.

My problems didn’t start until around February-ish, so my hunch is that some people were affected starting with 14.0 and others like me perhaps not until 14.3 or 14.4. If the problem is a coding flaw, perhaps the problem code was added in 14.0 but settings or other variable factors could cause the problem to only become noticeable later.

Hi, I have an iPhone 8 and I updated it from iOS 13 to the latest version of iOS 14 (14.4.2) and my front camera won’t work. Black screen. Also, some apps have a hard time when launching and they get stuck for minutes, restarting the phone doesn’t help, makes it worse.

I tried every possible fix I’ve seen on the internet and doesn’t work. Even reset my phone to factory settings and nothing.

Have you found a solution yet?

I am not being disrespectful to you, but to Apple by saying, “Good luck!”

my iPhone 8 has been messed up since one of the last iOS 13.x.x releases. The back camera and flashlight only periodically work. When one quits, both are out. Then mysteriously they’ll start working, generally after an install. But not always.

I refuse to buy another phone.

if it is busted then you really need another phone or chance the high street butcher repair shops.

Updates put phones under strain and hardware weaknesses show up.

hundreds of millions of iphones make it through these same updates without problems.

It’s not busted. It’s thousands of $1,000 phones suddenly having severe performance problems that Apple caused all within the past 6 months by a patch in the 14 IOS line.

It looks broken, but on my phone at least, it’s actually a delay so bad (10 seconds sometimes) that it looks like the camera doesn’t work. What hardware issue causes that? Also, I don’t recall thousands of cameras breaking in the past. It’s not like it’s a flaw in the iPhone 7, or we would have seen it sooner and more spread out over time.

I’m pretty sure the problem would disappear from these “broken” phones if we were able to regress back to before IOS 14, but Apple has made that impossible.

Apple caused it and they can/should fix it, since these phones are still supported. It’s software, not hardware.

Software problems *can* break just a small percentage of phones, depending on various variables. In fact I have a hard time thinking of any software bug that affects 100% of systems — because those bugs would quickly be discovered in testing and fixed. It’s usually the bugs that affect less than 100% of devices that slip out into the public.

It’s nice that Apple tried to fix it with 14.0.1, but the fact that they described it as an iPhone 7 problem suggests they weren’t aware of the scope of the problem. Either that patch didn’t fix the problem, or Apple caused regression back to a broken state by their newer patches, which they’re supposed to try to avoid by regression testing. Either way, the fact that they acknowledged it once and tried to fix it once (successfully they thought) only strengthens my opinion that Apple should fix this.

Why are you being so hostile and argumentative? The users like me haven’t done anything wrong.

As I explained, I believe you are wrong about the cameras or phone being “busted.” If the phone was busted, how could Apple have tried and thought they fixed the issue with 14.0.1? That makes little sense.

No one said anything about jail breaking. Perhaps that person reverted their phone back before Apple revoked the certificate signing for 14.2? But the info that reverting to 14.2 helped that user is useful information.

It appears clear that these iPhones developed problems immediately after installing some variant of IOS 14.x — problems they didn’t have before the update. Even if you think Apple has no responsibility to resolve those issues, it is totally understandable for those users to be angry about this situation of having suddenly lost use of their iPhones after an Apple update.