Update: According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, "Apple has identified a fix for the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max camera shake issue and a software update will be released next week."
The iPhone 14 Pro's camera sees a big jump from to 48 megapixels from 12MP, but apparently the latest transition hasn’t gone completely smoothly.
9to5Mac has spotted a number of reports of iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max users reporting unusable cameras in third-party apps. This is accompanied by ominous-sounding rattling or grinding noises.
The site has collected reports of issues in some of the most popular camera-focused apps, including Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. “Picked up my new iPhone 14 pro yesterday and intermittently get ois camera shake (by shake I mean can see and hear it shaking) in Snapchat,” wrote one.
“So I’ve been experiencing my camera shaking uncontrollably whenever I open Snapchat or use the camera for Instagram,” another wrote. “However, I don’t run into any issues when I use the regular camera app.”
This gives you an idea of what it’s like in practice:
@damian.m.munoz ♬ Me Porto Bonito - Bad Bunny & Chencho Corleone
And here’s another:
So uh, we’re having some issues with the 14 Pro Max camera pic.twitter.com/7HH1wLFjdFSeptember 16, 2022
Frankly, it’s a bit of a headscratcher. Plenty of people (including myself, having just tried it with Instagram) can’t replicate the problem at all, which would suggest a hardware fault. Our global editor in chief Mark Spoonauer also could not replicated the rattling issue in Instagram.
At the same time, none of the affected users appear to have an issue with Apple’s built-in camera app, which would suggest it’s something that third-party app makers need to address. But if that were the case, you would assume it would apply to every iPhone 14 Pro owner out there and it clearly doesn’t.
It’s not clear whether this is a few isolated cases or evidence of a wider issue, but we’ve reached out to Apple, Snap, TikTok and Instagram to ask about the problem, and will update this story if and when they get back to us.
But for now, affected users will have to play the waiting game. I wouldn’t recommend using the camera in affected apps until it’s clear one way or another what exactly the problem is.
Next: Facing another issue with your new iPhone 14? Check out our guide on all the bugs and issues so far on the iPhone 14 and when to expect a fix for them.
