Camera and Microphone Indicators

Although iOS has provided some notifications for when a background app is accessing your camera or microphone, these were sometimes a bit vague, and more importantly they only worked when apps were actually doing this in the background. In other words, if an app decided to do something sneaky with your camera while you were actually using it — as some popular apps have been caught doing already — you had no indication of this. Of course, you have to grant access to the camera in the first place, but once you’ve given an app like Facebook access to your camera, it can turn it on any time it’s running, and until now you had no way of knowing if apps were doing this.

Now iOS 14 will tell you when your camera or microphone has been enabled, and even point the finger at the app that’s behind it. A small green dot to the right of the front-facing camera will appear when the camera is on, regardless of the app or process doing it — even turning it on to animate a Memoji in Messages will trigger it. Likewise, an orange dot will appear whenever the microphone is on.

In addition, swiping down to bring up control center will reveal which app is (or was) using the camera or microphone, so if you see suspicious behaviour, you can find out who the culprit is right away.