Apple Won’t Let You Set Your Own Brightness In iOS 11

Apple’s iOS 11 comes with many surprises, and not all of them good: the latest developer beta of the OS makes it a pain to manually set brightness.

Previously, you could toggle automatic brightness on and off right from the Display & Brightness section of Settings – you know, where it should be. Now the option is buried all the way under General>Accessibility>Display Accommodations, where pretty much no one will find it.

To be clear, Apple’s version of auto-brightness does allow for some flexibility. Similar to adaptive brightness on Android, you still get a brightness slider, but instead of setting a fixed brightness, it roughly establishes a brightness range.

The idea is that even if you set your brightness low, the screen will still brighten when you step outside into the sunlight. But sometimes auto-brightness gets it wrong, and the subtle adjustments in brightness can be annoying for some activities like watching a long movie.

Sure, it’s a bit of nitpicking. For most people, auto-brightness is fine. But I frequently alternate between auto and manual brightness depending on what I’m doing, and there’s no reason to bury such an inoffensive and commonly used setting under several non-intuitive menus.