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johannnn

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Nov 20, 2009
2,375
2,781
Sweden
The camera on my mums iPhone 5 (I think running iOS8) recently stopped working. She claims it hasn't been dropped etc.
When launching the camera app, the screen is completely black. The front camera seems to work (switching from within the Camera app), but the screen usually freezes so it becomes a still picture of my face.

Just looking at the camera on the back of the phone, I see nothing wrong.
Has anyone heard of this or similar issue? Do you think the functionality could be rescued by a reinstall of the OS or an upgrade (will probably make it much slower though)?
 
It does sound like hardware but you can always try a hard reset/iOS update to verify this. Just to advise that iOS 10 runs pretty smoothly on the iPhone 5, so it'll be a far cry from the intolerable iPhone 4/iOS 7 experience.
 
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