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Facing "screen burn-in" on your iPhone 15 Pro? Apple has a fix for you
- Several users have reported a “screen burn-in” issue on the iPhone 15 series.
- However, this issue is not a hardware bug but an image retention issue on iOS 17.
- iOS 17.1 RC build fixes this image retention issue, and Apple will be rolling out iOS 17.1 in the stable branch to all users very soon.
The iPhone 15 series brings some notable changes to the iPhone lineup, more so than we have seen from Apple in recent years. But alongside these changes also came bugs that severely impacted user experience. The first was the heating issue on the iPhone 15 Pro series that took Apple a while to acknowledge but was then promptly fixed with an iOS 17 update. Users have also been complaining of a “screen burn-in” issue, and the upcoming iOS 17.1 update will fix that, too.
We have been tracking reports of screen burn-in on the iPhone 15 Pro Max for the past two weeks, as several users have reported the same on the Apple subreddit.
Screen burn-in is a common and well-documented issue on OLED smartphones, but it usually occurs over time. The gist of the issue is that some parts of the display degrade quicker due to higher use, which can shift the screen’s perceivable colors in one area more than in another, leaving behind a “ghost” image.
However, time is essential for screen burn-in, and the iPhone 15 Pro is very early in its product lifecycle to suffer from screen burn-in. Further, in many reports, the exact burned image was surprisingly displayed only temporarily but remained despite reboots.
Turns out, this is not screen burn-in but an image retention issue on iOS 17. Apple has released the iOS 17.1 Release Candidate build to beta testers, and reports are coming in that this has fixed the image retention issue.
Other Redditors confirm that the iOS 17.1 RC update has fixed the issue for them, indicating that it indeed is a software bug and not a hardware fault on the OLED displays on the iPhone 15 series.
If you have noticed a “screen burn-in” issue on your iPhone 15 series, you can either update to the iOS 17.1 Release Candidate build by enrolling in the beta track or wait for the update to be released in the stable branch. Since the build has already received Release Candidate status, Apple should be rolling out iOS 17.1 to the stable branch very soon.