Anyone with an iPhone 15 Pro should install iOS 17.1 when it launches this week, especially if their new handset seems to be suffering from screen burn-in. Turns out it’s not a hardware problem but the result of a software bug that gets fixed by the upcoming update.
Plus, there are other new features coming in iOS 17.1.
iPhone 15 screen burn in… already? Nope.
Anyone who’s used a very old display should be familiar with screen burn-in. An image appears as a ghostly overlay to whatever is being shown now.
It’s a potential problem with OLED displays, but it’s one that takes a lengthy time to happen. Years. Which is why it’s so weird that it’s already being reported on Reddit that iPhone 15 Pro models are showing screen burn-in after a few weeks.
Turns out this isn’t the usual version of the display problem. It’s a software bug. And one that’ll be fixed by iOS 17.1.
Apple told developers testing the betas of this upcoming iPhone software update that it, “Fixes an issue that may cause display image persistence.”
A genuine fix
Photo: spriteice/Reddit
With traditional screen burn-in, once the display has the problem it never goes away. That is not what is happening with the iPhone 15 Pro models.
Users who have new iOS handsets showing what seems to be screen burn-in have only to install iOS 17.1 to remove the issue. The fix is included in beta versions, and a Reddit user posted before and after pics with the note, “After updating today the issue is entirely gone.”
So the problem isn’t really screen burn-it. It’s a bizarre image persistence issue instead.
iOS 17.1 is right around the corner
iOS 17.1 is about much more than a fix for a display problem. Perhaps the most significant change is support for AirDrop file transfers over the internet. And the upcoming version tweaks the iPhone 15 Pro Action button’s behavior to prevent accidental keypresses.
A number of other, smaller changes are also included.
