I think it was well-established on day 1 that it was bad. It's too far in to use horizontally and too far out to use vertically.
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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As a left hander the button is actually perfectly aligned with my middle finger while holding the phone.
Yay for being in a minority, right?
I actually like and use the camera button, but maybe I’m in the minority.
No, I’m with you. I was just using it yesterday to take quick pictures of my son at the zoo while holding a drink in my other hand. The need to go from pocket to snapping perfectly zoomed pictures all with one hand quickly before the animals moved meant that without this button I wouldn’t have gotten half the shots I did.
I really like having a quick and tactile way to get the camera up and taking pictures. I had android phones back in the day that did this with a combination of the power button double tap to launch and volume buttons to snap pictures, the latter I know iOS does as well.
I do find the swipe and soft touch features of the camera control to be unintuitive. It took me a while to even realize I could change the swipe gesture to control zoom instead of the default color/tone setting which I almost never want to change. Seriously don’t understand why zoom wasn’t the default.
- The button needs two clicks to take a picture, with a timed delay, one too many imo
- Touch sensitivity is useless, zoom, options
Wasn’t the idea that this button was put in in anticipation of AI looking at things being a future use case? It sounded like Apple was anticipating people wanting quick instant access to AI analysis of anything you point your camera at. Basically, being able to grab your phone and raise it while pressing the button and you would be poised to make your query.
Did I hallucinate this like an LLM?
That’s an actual use case, not future. Camera Control enables quick access to visual intelligence.
Oh good, I’m not crazy then. I’m still on a 12 mini.
I love my action button to open a quick menu of shortcuts I regularly run, but the camera control is actually useless. Maybe I’ve got big fingers but it’s too finicky. It never does what I intend it to do.
The camera button confuses the heck out of my Mom (a new iPhone owner).
I'd much rather have a home or back button than a camera one (which can be mapped to the action button or, ideally, multi tapping the volume button anyway).
Fine with me. There are too many buttons. Programming the “Action” button to take pictures is more than enough.