I’ve been plagued by an odd iOS bug for a while now. I couldn’t tell you exactly when it started, but sometime during the iOS 26 era, I noticed that my iPhone 17 Pro Max’s brightness controls were slower than usual. I found this strange: As far as I know, iPhones have had a consistent speed when changing brightness. You pull up Control Center, move the brightness slider up or down, and the brightness levels adjust accordingly, almost instantly. But not with this bug.
Since the bug, I’ve occasionally noticed that lowering the brightness is weirdly sluggish. Moving the slider still works, but I can see each brightness level adjust tick and tick, rather than one smooth adjustment. Plus, even when it reaches the bottom, it doesn’t seem as dark as it should be. I can tell, especially when using my iPhone in a dark room, it shouldn’t be this bright at its minimum level.
I wasn’t sure whether this was a hardware or a software quirk. The latter, of course, would be preferable. If this was something Apple could fix with a software update, that’d be easy enough. But if there was something wrong with 17 series’ displays, that could be another beast entirely. I didn’t really think it was hardware, since the issue was intermittent, but still, I had no idea what was going on, or how to fix it when it appeared.
How to fix this odd iOS brightness bug
The good news is I found a solution—though one I never would have expected. I finally thought to Google the problem, and found myself on this Reddit thread, with an iPhone 17 Pro user with the same problem as me. The top comment presented the solution: Press the Dictation button on your iPhone’s keyboard.
What do you think so far?
That made zero sense to me. What would dictation have to do with screen brightness? But I tried it anyway: I opened something like Spotlight on my iPhone, which activated the keyboard, and then I pressed the Dictation button. Presto: My screen immediately dropped its brightness, even though I had been on its “lowest” setting. When I tried adjusting the brightness, it worked as you’d expect: Lowering it was instantaneous. Why does this fix the problem? I have no clue, but it works. Whatever is dragging down the display brightness settings is relieved with iOS’ Dictation feature, or at least by activating the mic.
That Reddit post was from January, which means Apple still hasn’t patched this bug. I’m currently running the latest version of iOS as of this article (26.5.2), though I haven’t yet dipped my toe in the iOS 27 beta. It’s possible Apple has a patch in its next big iPhone update, but until I run it, I can’t say for sure. If your iPhone also has this strange brightness bug, at least there’s a solution—as unconventional as it may be.
