Hello. This post is for all the low vision IOS users out there.
I have been troubleshooting a couple of pretty annoying bugs with the IOS Magnifier app, mostly on my iPhone 16 Pro Max. I'm wondering if any other low vision users are experiencing anything similar.
I use Apple's built-in Magnifier app on a daily basis, for work, reading mail, and loads of other tasks. It's worked perfectly until the last few months. My first bug I noticed was shortly after getting my iPhone 16 Pro Max. The default view is Auto, so it picks the best camera for whatever you're magnifying. The problem I have is that when nearing the margin of a page, focus starts to blur, and then the image will often drastically jump, so the paper is completely out of view. This often happens when going back to the left margin to start reading a new line.
My work around for this was to switch to the camera Close-Up mode. This worked for a while. No focus jumping, and the image was very crisp and clear. That is until around IOS 18.3 or 18.4. Now in the Close-Up mode, the image is often so washed out or blurry that looking at a regular piece of paper only shows pure white, with little to no text visible. Interestingly my work iPhone 14 Pro Max doesn't have these problems at all, so it's something with the newer 16 series. The lighting is fine, even under low light, the 14 Pro Max works beautifully, not the 16 Pro Max though.
I have been in contact with Apple Accessibility regarding this, and have even installed the IOS 18.6 betas in the hope that one of these would fix these bugs. I also chatted with an Apple Accessibility rep via phone a couple of times, and they remote viewed my phones to see exactly the bugs I was talking about. Since I am running the developer beta of IOS 18.6, I also submitted this in the Feedback app, and added it to the AppleVis bug page thingy.
I went one step further, and did some experimenting on video, and shared it on YouTube and with Apple. Here is the link if anyone is curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfPYOhtVesA
I would be interested to see if anyone else is experiencing similar problems when using the Magnifier app, especially on a 16 series phone. It's really frustrating, because I use this tool so often, and it's worked great until fairly recently. This absolutely needs to be fixed soon, and if Apple hears from more people experiencing something similar, it may give them more to work with.
Thanks.