Ask HN: Why is there no activity indicator when an iPhone's camera is on?

If the camera is on it has to be shown on the screen right?

I’ve wondered this too. But maybe ux is more important in this case than privacy. There’s a red or blue bar that shows up when mic or location or hotspot is on. I’d hate to see that when my full screen camera app opens. But I do value privacy. So another solution would be what Mac has implemented. A led shows up whenever the camera is on. But I’ve seen reports and articles where it’s possible to fire the Mac camera and shut it off quickly before the LED has time to kick on. (I cover my Mac camera with a post-it).

I don’t know what the solution could be. Maybe a vibration of a specific kind?

I think Apple should address this. It’s a good next step in terms of privacy focused Apple and it’s something that will be rewarding for the user to see that whenever the camera opens, something happens. Good PR points for Apple. A win for the user.

Seems defeatable, unless it captures and matches the display output with the camera input, requiring some decently high correlation.

Yes, https://youtu.be/jTm4fjx_eZ0?t=532 this is done with React Native. I don't think nothing prevents you from rendering the camera UI preview component with an opacity of 0.0

I guess the main problem that no smartphone manufacturer wants to address is: People who take photos without permission to other people. It would be reasonable to enforce a law on all manufactures to add visible LED when the phone camera is being used, in my opinion at least.

The indicator indicates background activities. Eg. If you are using Google maps for navigation, the bar will show when you switch away from Google maps. But when you switch back, now it's happening in the foreground and the indicator disappears.

Camera can only be accessed by the foreground app.