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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.<\/p>\n
Since the bug, I’ve occasionally noticed that lowering\u00a0the 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
How to fix this odd iOS brightness bug<\/p>\n
The good news is I found a solution\u2014though one I never would have expected. I finally thought to Google the problem, and found myself on this Reddit thread<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n What do you think so far?<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n