iPhone 14 Camera is Blurry

As I've stated before, you have to back away from the QR code, then it will be recognized and you will be taken to the web page represented by the code.

Here's how Camera saw a QR code; note how far away I was from the code:

Now, when I open the Code Reader, this is the initial view I see. Of course you can't scan it by filling the frame with the blurry code:

However, once you back away, moments after I backed up to a distance where the code was in sharp focus:

The frame animated to "zoom in" to denote it had recognized the QR code:

At which point it the code changed to a Safari logo and opened the link in Safari.

I was able to use camera on iOS 16 - before updating to iOS 16.0.2. When I first set up the phone on iOS 16, in third party apps it would switch between the normal and the other camera, depending on the distance to the object that you wanted to take a picture of - just like it does in the literal camera app. After updating to iOS 16.0.2, nothing works. Now here is what I'm 99% convinced is going on:

People on Twitter have reported the camera shaking issues on the iPhone 14 Pro. The stabilizer and autofocus would just freak out whenever you have opened a third party app's camera screen.

[Edited by Moderator]

Yes this is happening to me too, have switched recently from an iPhone 11 to an iPhone 14 pro max purely because of the “good” camera, however whenever I open 3rd party apps my camera will not focus without several prompts to do so. Alongside this I appear to be facing the same issue even on the camera application. Really dissatisfied as this was the main reason I bought this phone!

Than the option was there in error.

The bottom line is if something works in all Apple’s apps but fails in third-party apps, the third-party apps were not programmed properly to utilize the new hardware.

For example, Walmart Pay for one works properly on my 14 Pro Max.

This is not at all how it works. Apple has not announced any changes to their camera API's at all. When you make a breaking change to your OS, you inform developers in the change notes. There are zero mentions of any of that, because they thought the automatic switching that they have enabled in iOS 16 will suffice (it did). Then they have removed it, and still no word on this in the change notes.

I appreciate how much you are trying to blame the developers here but Apple is known for handling breaking changes much differently than your "the developers will just be surprised on launch day that their apps break" approach that doesn't make sense at all. They are usually upfront about things like this to avoid launch-day issues. This is how you know that this time it's different and NOT the developers' fault.

This happens regularly with almost every new hardware release not to mention new release of iOS.

What the issue is, I couldn't say, but it also makes sense that if something is making multiple third-party apps misbehave they disable it until more third-party apps can be brought into compliance.

Apple is completely up front about these things, through their Developer Services, but you would be shocked at how many developers do not take advantage of beta access and instead wait until a product is released to update their products for compatibility if they do so at all.

Apple does not make "secret sauce" changes that only their own apps are aware of.

> Apple is completely up front about these things, through their Developer Services

Then link me the part where it informs about the camera API changes. Pro tip: You can't, because there is none and that renders the rest of your comment invalid. You describe how you think it works, but you can check for yourself that it doesn't work like you think it works on that very page that you have linked.

What you have linked is new in iOS 16.0, not 16.0.1, 16.0.2 etc.

Patches don't have API changes in them.

I appreciate that you have taken a moment to search for something that fits, but this doesn't fit. There is no camera announcement for the patches. No matter how hard you try, you unfortunately won't find any to support your claim.

You misunderstand.

It's possible that Apple disabled the option in 16.0.1 because so many third-party vendors got implementation of changes in iOS 16 wrong, but only Apple knows.

The fact that Apple apps functioned correctly and third-party apps did not puts the blame squarely on third-party app developers.

As I stated, it's also not an issue for all third-party apps, as some like Walmart Pay focusing on register QR codes work perfectly fine.

I suspect new settings like those I mentioned can be used to have the iPhone automatically switch to the wide camera to allow it to focus on bar codes to generate an image of the appropriate dimensions for reading.

We'll see how it works out in future releases.

> It's possible that Apple disabled the option in 16.0.1 because so many third-party vendors got implementation of changes in iOS 16 wrong, but only Apple knows.

You are correct if you want to assume that Apple would voluntarily risk iPhone customers breaking their cameras by using non-updated apps. There is no way that they would call that a reasonable choice. That also doesn't explain Apple's silence on the whole issue.

> The fact that Apple apps functioned correctly and third-party apps did not puts the blame squarely on third-party app developers.

If they didn't work with iOS 16.0 I'd agree, but again they did work with iOS 16.0

> Walmart Pay

That app doesn't switch cameras either. You assume it does because their physical product codes are large enough to be scanned with a distance of the focus length. Can't expect every barcode from now on to be "Apple size"™ because of that.

The bottom line is that it still comes down to third-party apps needing to be updated by their authors to properly work with iOS 16.

Apple in general doesn't release statements on issues except when they are fixed.

We actually don't know that; I don't know enough about the changes in iOS 16 to know how the camera API may provide for this with iOS 16 changes but there is no evidence that Apple uses a "private" API to provide this functionality only to their own apps.

Sometimes those authors have their hands tied. I work with a cross-platform framework and have recently gotten bug reports on my app that the iPhone 14 has the issue described in the thread. The reports have been solely from iPhone 14 users. After some research, I've seen the issue personally and confirmed that the 14 is the only phone my app is deployed to that has this issue. There is no documentation from Apple that said there were camera API changes between 16.0 and 16.0.2, yet I only started getting the reports after the release of 16.0.2.

I bet most of the 3rd party apps don't access the Apple API directly but rather use cross-platform libraries to make the calls. I can't do anything about my own situation, where nothing has changed in the API that I use (I still access the iPhone camera through the same device ID that I always have, using the same configuration for focusing. There's no new device IDs listed in the system on the 14 that wasn't available on the other iPhones. The same code works on every phone except for the iPhone 14). The developers in this case can't simply "code it better" without re-coding the entire App specifically for iOS in Swift or Obj-C, which isn't feasible for any business. Regardless, Apple has been very good in the past about making their interfaces backwards-compatible with existing code so that Xamarin/Qt/Flutter/etc. can continue working well with no changes even after major updates to iOS. Maybe the Walmart apps for different platforms were written specifically for those platforms, and that's why the Walmart app you mentioned earlier isn't having the same issue.

If an Apple engineer is reading this, perhaps you might take a look into whether it's cross-platform frameworks specifically that have this issue?