iPhone 12 screen brightness issue

Very significant issue in my opinion. Encountered the problem while I was trying to take photos at the beach on a sunny day, which is exactly when the screen needs to be at its brightest. Got under the shade for about 5 minutes, and the brightness magically came back. Like others have said, could be a problem that is caused by overheating.

I hear you!! I am on my 2nd 12 Pro Max and I give up...having so many issues!! I did factory resets 2x. Once from iCloud back up and once without. Neither made any difference. I am tethered to my charger and the screen dimming is driving me crazy!!

This has happened with every iPhone I have ever owned! After downloading IOS14.4 is when is started on my 12maxpro. Doesn't matter what you change the settings to it remains "dim" unless at full brightness and inside.

I think it is what the English car manufactures use to refer to as a "CAC" Customer Acceptable Condition - a condition the customer just has to accept cause we don't know how to fix it.

Very disappointing

I figured it out! A couple of weeks ago I had my camera open and put the phone down on a table for a bit and when I picked it up it was “super zoomed” and it would not respond to touch. After much fussing with it I got it to reset and when it came back that’s when the “dim screen” started happening. (Did not notice it right away as I was inside).

Finally put it together and when to “accessibility” and “zoom” was engaged - clicked it off and amazingly the screen brightened!

This is for all the iPhone 12 Pro Max people with brightness issues.....IT IS AN OVERHEATING ISSUE......take your phone put it on your car AC vent, set AC to max cool-high fan and watch the brightness magically reset to MAX brightness.

i find this very annoying to have to deal with and why hasn’t APPLE told us that the phone dims in defense of over heating....also why hasn’t APPLE told us these phones run VERY hot??????

I have tried all the accessibility settings as mentioned. But none worked. However, luckily I had iPhone 7 Plus before and had the same problem. It was fixed with triple clicking on the home button. I tried to see how this works on iPhone 12, then I found it! This is how I do it:

1) I go to Settings>accessibility>Touch>back tap>triple tap (I use triple tap because double tap is for me to do screenshot)

2) Set the triple tap to Zoom (it's under accessibility)

3) That's it. Go ahead and try triple tap at the back. Your screen will be bright again as your future.

I’ve tried to reproduce the effect myself and have not been able to do it. What I remember was that I had my camera open on the phone, placed it lenses side down for a couple of minutes. When I came back to pick it up, it was hot and the screen was covered in small lines of various colors. Tried to turn it off, mistakenly ended up with a 911 call screen, and when i tried to clear it the phone was suddenly in super zoom. Finally got it to reboot and that’s when I noticed a while later that it was dim in sunlight, took me a week to stumble upon the zoom setting that once i clicked it off the phone brightened immediately, clicking it back on did not effect brightness.

Omg i just followed you and turn off autobrightness in accessibility and I was in awe how bright the screen went i was like OMG i can use this screen to light my house hahaha no kidding the screen is soooo bright i had to reduce it in screen and brightness setting. So cool

That’s weird because mine is constantly doing this and it hasn’t gotten above 35 degrees where I am in weeks. Why just today as a matter of fact I was sitting in my dressing work truck and had just taken my phone out of my pocket and started a video while my truck was warming up. Within 2 minutes the screen looked like I flipped off the lights in a roomy dimly lit by the sun. It does this many times a day and lasts for hours. I have triple checked my settings and I have the brightness all the way up and auto dim turned off.

I’ve got the 12 Pro. Wasn’t using my phone at all. Was not charging, sit down and plug in the charger and 2 minutes later it happened. First time with this phone. The XR was the worst phone I had since the Galaxy 3 (after that I went to Apple). Might be time to check out from this company.

I am a Developer. Here is the bug folks: The phone is not technically dimming; the software is setting the maximum brightness to a lower level, in percentage increments. You can see this happen in stages, and when it does, go to your brightness gauge. You’ll notice that it will slide from top to bottom, but may only actually be working from 0% up to say 20% or 30%. Any manual setting of the slider higher than that level has no effect. You can see this happen in real time.

Sanity check: One iOS program’s feature that is unaffected by this “low-maximum” bug is the video setting in the camera. When the iOS software has reduced max brightness so low you can barely see a thing on the display, launch your camera to set it to take a video, and watch the phone magically light back up again and return to normal. Change the camera from video to photo and watch the max-brightness drop again right before your eyes. Switch away from the video activated camera app to anything else, even just the home screen and it’ll start getting darker. Switch back to vid-camera and illumination returns to full, as the vid-cam feature ignores/bypasses the current system maximum brightness value.

This is an obvious bug, an iOS bug when running on iPhone 12 Max Pro hardware; a bug that is dropping the max-brightness value, and by doing so decreasing general/global display luminosity to unusable levels. Even II it’s a design flaw with a sensor somewhere on the iPhone hardware sending the operating system bad telemetry data, the iOS could be written a patch to ignore the false readings if it detects its running on an iPhone model 12 Pro Max (or any other similarly defective iPhone models).

This is a bug.

A bug that should be treated as a P1-Critical PR in my opinion.

Marc

Is this discussion enough to raise the bug to developers or do we have open a ticket to Apple in some other way? If so , grabowsky can you do it for us since you seem to have a deep understanding of this topic?

This is a reoccurring problem that sometimes is associated with lower battery levels and other times is not. Sometimes I need the screen to be bright for the work that I do and it just refuses and I have to power it down and power it back up which is just totally ridiculous. Instinct says Apple is trying to save these screens because of the resale market and the resale value of these phones. So when you buy a phone is it really your phone or are you going to give it away in a year or two? That is probably why the screen issues are coming up… To save the screen. But if you’ve purchased the phone and it’s yours you shouldn’t have to endure this BS

Tried what? I haven’t suggested any remedy just a reason why this is happening

either software code written to make it happen

or degrading batteries switch to low power mode

with my phone cool, 3/4 better full, the phone goes into low battery mode — why? To protect the battery and screen

cyclical

yes!!!

Strange, those settings were the cause!

I've been outside and had no problem before, but after reset of the phone, suddenly, maxed brightness outside was not enough. Disconnecting these features brought all to normal. Is this something I should be contacting apple? Is it a defect? Or this is the same for all iphones 12 max pro?

PS iphone 7 plus IS VERY BRIGHT!