My Best iPhone Hack: Turn Off Your Camera Control Button For Good. Here’s the Way
As a lifelong Apple fan, I was happy to finally upgrade to a new iPhone after my beloved but worn iPhone 11 died. There’s a lot to like about the new models, including iPhone 16with one major exception. One feature kept bugging me and making my phone difficult to use. Disabling this feature made all the difference for me to enjoy using my phone again, and it can for you too.
Coming from an older iPhone model, I was surprised to see two new buttons on the 16: action buttons and camera control buttons. The action button is a small button above the volume adjusters. It was introduced with the iPhone 15 Pro models and is a customizable button that can do anything from unlocking your ring to ordering a coffee at Dunkin’ to go. It’s small, demo and mind its own business. It’s the camera control button that caused all the chaos.
Camera control is a new button on the iPhone 16 lineup that does what the name suggests: It controls your camera. It’s designed to help you take photos quickly and acts as a shortcut to launch your camera app. You can slide your finger into the settings menu to adjust the camera zoom, among other settings. But there is one real reason for its existence: AI. All iPhone 17 models have this button as well.
Like every other technology company, Apple is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. Apple Intelligence has been the driving force behind much of the company’s innovation, with many AI updates in the new iOS 26. But there’s no bigger sign of Apple’s dive into AI than the camera control button. It’s a virtual gateway to Visual Intelligence, a new AI-powered feature that lets you use your camera to scan objects in the real world to find out more about them. It sounds silly, but this is useless to me, and it’s a feature I’ve never been tempted to use.
There are other uses for the camera control button, including ways to customize the button settings, as my colleagues have discovered through their testing. But that doesn’t change the fact that my camera control button is completely annoying.
It is a long button, about the size of the power button, located on the lower right side of the device. And it’s very easy to accidentally tap. I’ve had my camera open while putting my phone in my pocket, while driving and using navigation apps and once when I turned off my phone at night, which left the camera app open overnight and drained my phone’s battery.
And if that wasn’t annoying enough, every time I intended to open my camera using the camera controls, it took a few taps to do so. Go find out. When I enabled the camera controls, my camera roll included great photos like these:
I couldn’t tell you when or where these photos were accidentally taken.
My question: What is the point of a button that works when you don’t need it and doesn’t work when you do? There are already three different ways to access your iPhone’s camera on the lock screen that take just seconds to use. Camera control is an expensive and unreliable addition to the new iPhones, all because of AI features that most people don’t need or use. And there hasn’t been a single moment since I turned off the camera controller that I missed.
I realize that my grip on the camera controls is a minor complaint among all the good things about the new phone. But as an AI journalist, I can’t help but see this as a worrying sign. Many tech companies have adapted their software and devices to be AI-ready, whether it’s Google spamming us with Gemini pop-ups in every single Google app, the new Copilot button on Microsoft Windows laptops or Apple’s camera control button.
Tech companies are so eager to get on the AI train and never give enough thought to whether those features improve or just hinder our experience using their products. And there aren’t enough exit options to offer. Thanks to me and my camera, Apple does. But I hope in the future, such drastic measures will not be necessary as companies become more deliberate with their AI-enabled features.
If you want to join me in disabling your camera control button, navigate to your iPhone settings and select the camera. Then, click camera controller. Within the camera controls, select accessibilitythen open the camera controller. If you also experience high sensitivity, you can adjust how many taps (and presses are required) to trigger the button on that same access page below the power to suppress light.
For more, check out our hands-on experience with the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max.
