Pinch to zoom in Safari not working consistently on IOS 15

It’s not just devices with the A12 or A12X. I have an iPhone 7 (A10) and an iPad Air 4 (A14). Since it’s an intermittent problem, I can’t verify it yet, but I think the iOS 15.2 update fixed it on my iPad. I haven’t updated the iPhone to that yet.

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.

Dear Apple,

This was the beginning. Steve convinced the world with an iPhone with smart and smooth handling .

Now, since iOS 15.x Till 15.2, the smooth zoom function in my mail app seems broken, many repeats are necessarry to zoom on my iPhone X . It feels like an unfinished product now or to have a cheap third party mobile phone in hands. Some month ago, in iOS 14 all was fine.

Please take responsibility and get this fixed soon.

thank you in advance.

yours sincerely

a user from first day

[Link Edited by Moderator]

To those that recommend disabling live text as a workaround, live text is not supported on a lot of older devices so we cannot disable it.

May this is a lead for Apple. That some part of live text is active even on unsupported devices?

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.

Yeah I’ve seen about five different things that I’ve worked for different people which is quite bizarre. When I spoke with Apple a few weeks ago they knew nothing about it and the tech guy even wanted me to send him the link to this thread because he didn’t believe there was that many people having an issue. Oh well sorry it didn’t work for you…

I turned on touch accommodations and it looks promising this far - thanks for the tip.

What’s strange about this problem is it does not happen consistently for me.

Has anyone tried 15.2.1? There is no mention of this fix but I read that Apple does not always list all fixes. Im afraid it might break something else though.

iOS 15.2.1 no help for me either. Disabling live text seems to give just temporary relief.

I'm now just falling in to the habit of quitting/relaunching Safari/Mail whenever it starts happening... and then it's fixed until the next time.

New cynical low from Apple. I upgraded from an X to an XS in part due to this issue. Only to still suffer it, of course!

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.

I see that my last comment got erased. I just stated the obvious. Apple put that bug in 15.0 to push people to upgrade. They took it out in 15.3 so they dodge a class action lawsuit. I will rewrite this message until they quit erasing it.

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.

Just to add my voice confirming that this is finally fixed for me on my iPhone XS on iOS 15.3. Not sure how long the forgiving will take though. I'm not pretending this was initially deliberate, but the neglect and disrespect in not acknowledging or prioritising is practically the same thing.

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 ;)

Regardless of the whys and wherefores I’m just happy that the bug finally got fixed. I don’t have the time, or the energy to put into discussing who or what or why this was introduced. I’m just glad that it’s now gone, just as I imagine 99%

of the people that posted in this forum are too.

Thanks all for all your useful comments and suggestions over the last 6+ months. No doubt we’ll all be chatting again when the next annoying bug crops up in 15.4.

R

The annoying problem seems fixed on my iphone 8. But it looks that my Ipad on which I read my newspaper, where I use the pinch to zoom feature a lot, still has the same issue. Anyone else? Or would it be app-related? App works well on iphone though..