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The best iOS 12 feature by far: No more dumb iPhone X screenshots

Published Jun 5th, 2018 4:56PM EDT
iPhone X screenshot issue disable: iOS 12 new features

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The iPhone X is, objectively speaking, a fantastic phone. It’s has a great screen and a pleasing design and good battery life and all is a technological marvel, a testament to what can happen when thousands of engineers take billions in R&D spending and work hard for over a decade on making the ultimate product.

Unfortunately, it also has one of the worst bugs in any smartphone I’ve ever used: If you pick it up wrong [insert your choice of “holding it wrong joke here”], you’ll accidentally take a screenshot. Over the course of days and weeks, these screenshots will clog up your memory and make browsing through your photos a pain. And no, I’m not alone in suffering from this very first-world affliction.

But fellow iPhone X screenshot sufferers can rejoice, because it seems that Apple has a fix in the works. It’s done what it should have done in the first place, and disabled screenshots when the device is locked and the display is off. Users on Reddit spotted the change, and I can confirm with my own iPhone X running the iOS 12 beta: If you press the volume up and power buttons while the display is off, no screenshot gets taken. Your phone will wake up, and that’s it.

Anyone who hasn’t used an iPhone X day-to-day is probably lying on the floor at this point, wondering how buttons not doing something can possibly merit an afternoon of my life and multiple blog posts. I’d say that Apple actually listening to its customers and rapidly adding a feature (read: accepting that they dun goofed) is a big deal all on its own; Even if you don’t buy that, consider the tens of millions of iPhone Xs that Apple has sold, multiply by approximately 3.5 accidental screenshots per day, and you can begin to appreciate the amount of time and memory storage that has been wasted on this stupid oversight.

Chris Mills
Chris Mills News Editor

Chris Mills has been a news editor and writer for over 15 years, starting at Future Publishing, Gawker Media, and then BGR. He studied at McGill University in Quebec, Canada.