Pinch to zoom in Safari not working consistently on IOS 15

ooh! great catch! testing on my XS seemed to confirm this, so i disabled 3d touch in accessibility. pinch to zoom is now working much the same as it did pre-update. (still it tries to “zoom” me out of my current tab sometimes but otherwise is functional.)

Another workaround I've found is to touch the screen *extremely* lightly while pinching. That also seems to work pretty much every time, but is even more annoying than pinching while scrolling. Because of this light-touch workaround, and the devices that are affected, I suspect this bug has something to do with the 3D touch feature of these phones.

Seems to be a problem with “Live Text”. I turned it off and zoom is much better.

Curious if it helps others.

To disable Live Text:

Settings >

General >

Language and Region >

Live Text

I rebooted after the change using volume up, volume down and holding power until the phone rebooted, but this may not be necessary.

This fixed it for me:

Settings -> General -> Language & Region -> Live Text (disable this feature)

Power down and restart

Not ideal but pinch and zoom working consistently is way more useful to me than live text

Turning off Live Text as someone else in this thread suggested seems to have at least made it better for me, if not solved it. They also said to restart after turning it off.

Settings > General > Language & Region > Live Text

deactivating live text fixed the issue for me.

hey Apple, try the page https://pavelmayer.de/covid/risks/ with iphone Xs and live text activated ! Its a horror to try to zoom in the big table !

please fix !!!

Yep, it sure seems like 15.3 fixes it. It released officially today and I forced a software update. I can usually tell within seconds that it’s broken. After 30 minutes of usage, no sign of the problem anymore.

Can confirm, the problem is fixed on 15.3 (iPhone X here). Been using it for 24h now, and it's definitely working as it did before. Feels good - I almost forgot what it's like to have a normal working phone.

I just tried the Ecosia browser on my Xs Max and the pinch to zoom worked at first but then started to fail again.

On my phone, this is not only affecting the browsers (Safari, Firefox, and now Ecosia) but also the Gmail app and native email app.

What’s interesting is it seems the first time I launch and app it will work a few times then start having the issue.

In order to get it to work I will try zooming several times and in many cases I have to flip to landscape mode and back to portrait to get it to work.

Frustrating to be sure.

Toggling On just the Touch Accommodations switch didn't improve this problem for me.

Toggling that On as well as "Use Initial Touch Location" under Tap Assistance does seem to alleviate this problem: When you zoom, the zooming lags about 0.1s behind my gesture, but it does seem to zoom consistently. Enabling this switch however messes up all other gestures on the phone, like swiping up quickly from the bottom to minimize the app or swiping from the left edge of the screen to go back. You have to do these gestures very slowly or otherwise they don't work. Even simple scrolling up/down lags with this enabled.

Only thing that remains to reliably help with this problem is touching the screen extremely lightly while making the zoom gesture.

15.3 fixed the problem for me. A few people seem to think Apple did this on purpose to make iPhone 10 users upgrade. I doubt that Apple purposefully introduced a bug. A company whose specialty is gear that is reliable and easy to use would quickly go out of business if their expensive gear was always unreliable or buggy. Also, strange that they would pick only the iPhone 10 and not other models.

A few also think Apple ignored the problem. First, I have never seen apple respond to threads on this forum, but I assume they monitor it and that they knew about the bug. Second, Apple rarely publishes bug info, but they silently fix the problem.

Finally, the reason it took so long is probably not that apple doesn't care or that they hope you will buy a new phone instead of waiting for a fix. The reason it took so long is that it was probably a difficult bug to fix, and then test, and then fit into a release.

Another possibility is that QAnon did this ;)

Fixed for me in 15.2.

updated to 15.2 and the problem is fixed.

it seems to have fixed the problem. after update 15.2 works again

After three weeks of frustration I finally found a fix, well at least for me everyone else can try it:

settings -accessibility - touch - touch accommodations and toggle on