iPhone SE panorama stitching bug - has anyone else seen this?

iPhoneSE panorama stitching bug - has anyone else seen this?

I’ve been experiencing a persistent issue with the Panorama mode on my iPhone SE, and I’d love some insight. I’ve now seen this issue on two different iPhone SEs, but never on my iPhone 7.

Here’s what’s happening:

When I take a panorama, there’s sometimes a noticeable stitching error about 20% of the way into the image. If doing the panorama from left to right, the leftmost section and the next frame don’t line up properly, but the rest of the panorama looks fine. This issue doesn’t happen in every panorama, but when it does, it’s always in that same spot.

Other key details:

1. On my first iPhone SE, this mainly happened in low light.
2. On my second iPhone SE, it didn’t happen at all in the first month but started occurring periodically after that, even in bright daylight.
3. I never saw this issue on my iPhone 7
4. Sometimes the stitching error appears as a shift up and sometimes as a shift down
5. The magnitude of the shift in the stitching error is not always the same amount.
6. Taking the panorama from right to left doesn’t fix it.
7. Apple suggested it might be a vibration issue, but that doesn’t make sense—if it were, one would expect issues throughout the entire panorama, not just in one specific spot.
8. Apple suggested removing the phone case to see if that makes a difference. I tried this and it does not seem to make a difference.

I’ve attached two photos:

1) A panorama with the stitching issue.

1a) A zoomed-in version highlighting the misalignment.

2) A nearly identical panorama where the issue doesn’t occur.

This seems like a software bug in Apple’s stitching algorithm—perhaps related to how frames are selected and aligned at that 20% mark.

Has anyone else run into this? Any insights would be much appreciated.