How-To

Is Your iPhone Automatically Dimming? Here’s How To Fix It

Asare Michael Baarffour (Devarsh) 1 month ago

Is Your iPhone Automatically Dimming? Here’s How To Fix It? Sometimes it seems like your iPhone has a mind of its own. Maybe an app closes unexpectedly or your phone restarts itself, both of which are annoying, but they usually happen for a reason.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t annoying, though, and if your screen’s brightness keeps changing on its own, you might feel like you’ve tried everything.

There are a few reasons why your screen brightness might change on its own, and turning off auto-brightness isn’t always the answer (though it’s a good start).

In this guide, we’ll show you how to turn off two settings that make your iPhone automatically dim. And how, if you’re not careful, your iPhone might change the brightness even when these two settings are turned off.

How To Fix Your iPhone If It Is Automatically Dimming

First, turn off the automatic brightness.

Even though it may seem obvious, the first thing you need to do is make sure that your settings don’t have automatic brightness turned on.

This feature is pretty easy to understand: it automatically changes the brightness of your screen based on how bright it is where you are. But you have to turn off this feature if you don’t want your display to always try to adjust.

In the Settings application, go to Accessibility > Display & Text Size and toggle off Auto-Brightness at the bottom of the page.

You would think that this setting would exist in Display & Brightness, so it’s not uncommon that auto-brightness would be enabled without you really knowing since it’s tucked away in Accessibility.

You must also turn True Tone off.

If you have an iPhone SE (2nd generation) or later, the True Tone feature can measure the color temperature and brightness of your surroundings and adjust the screen to match them.

True Tone is useful because it not only helps show more accurate colors in different lighting situations, but it also makes reading on your phone easier on your eyes, which is important if you do a lot of that.

Again, you need to turn it off if you don’t care about the feature, don’t use it, or just don’t like how the brightness keeps changing on its own.

Under the Brightness heading in Settings, go to Display & Brightness and turn off True Tone. If auto-brightness is also turned off, turning off True Tone should stop your iPhone from changing the brightness on its own.

Don’t let your iPhone heat up too much.

Your iPhone has a few ways to keep its internal parts safe, one of which is to automatically dim your screen.

Even if both auto-brightness and True Tone are turned off, if your iPhone is getting too hot, it will automatically change how bright the screen is.

Apple says that you should use your iPhone in temperatures between 32 and 95 degrees F (0 and 35 degrees C) and keep it in temperatures between 4 and 113 degrees F (4 and 45 degrees C) (between 20 below zero and 45 degrees C).

On a hot day, if you leave your iPhone in your car or on the sidewalk, it’s likely to get too hot, which will cause the screen to automatically dim.

But it’s not just sunny days that cause people to get too hot. If your iPhone gets too hot, it could be because of a bad battery: Check if your battery needs to be replaced by going to Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging. Software bugs could be another reason: Go to Settings > General > Software Update and make sure you’re always on the most recent update to fix software bugs and other problems.