If you’re busy doing whatever it is that drains your iPhone’s battery and you see an orange dot on the screen, you might want to be cautious.
Given the range of features that phones can offer, it makes sense to give customers a way to learn about subjects that they might not be familiar with but still need to understand.
The orange dot is meant to alert you to something, but it may be a benign message or something far more sinister, depending on what you’re doing.
To put it simply, that orange dot means that an app is using the microphone on the phone, and in many cases, that’s perfectly acceptable.
Some iPhone users, however, were worried about seeing the orange dot while they weren’t utilizing the microphone.
Some people are anxious that their phone is listening to them, and you might be worried if you don’t know why the orange dot is on.
People who see the dot and aren’t doing anything that needs the microphone to be on have been warned that there could be major problems.
The most common explanation provided is that they were using an app they had forgotten about, even though many people who learned about this said they were “quite alarmed” when they saw the orange dot.
Closing apps repeatedly until the dot disappears is the best course of action if you’re unsure which one it is.
Shut down the phone if it doesn’t work. When you turn it back on, you should get concerned if the orange dot remains.
Despite some issues, wouldn’t it be better to have a visible indicator when a phone app is using the camera or microphone instead of none at all?
To be clear, an orange dot at the top of your iPhone’s screen denotes that one of the apps is using the microphone right now, which means your voice is being recorded.
The app is using the phone’s camera instead of its microphone when a green dot appears at the same spot on the screen.
For example, when I pick up my phone and utilize the camera, the screen shows a green dot; when I close an app, the screen briefly becomes orange before turning off entirely.
That’s essentially my phone telling me that since I’m using it as a camera, the lens and microphone are in use. That should be rather obvious, but you should also be mindful of the other apps that are open.
If you’re worried about the dot appearing, go into your settings and change the permissions that various apps have to use your camera and microphone.
