Apple Fixes the iPhone X 'Unresponsive When It's Cold' Bug (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: Apple released iOS 11.1.2 for iPhones and iPads Thursday afternoon. It's a minor, bug-fix update that benefits iPhone X users who encountered issues after acquiring the new phone just under two weeks ago... The update fixes just two problems. The first is "an issue where the iPhone X screen becomes temporarily unresponsive to touch after a rapid temperature drop." Last week, some iPhone X owners began reporting on Reddit and elsewhere that their touchscreens became temporarily unresponsive when going outside into the cold... The update also "addresses an issue that could cause distortion in Live Photos and videos captured with iPhone X."
The article notes that the previous update "fixed a strange and widely mocked autocorrect bug that turned the letter 'i' into strange characters."

"To date, iOS 11's updates have largely been bug fixes."

Comments

Re:Wondering what the root cause of that issue was

[guruevi]

The iPhone screen system includes a false touch detection system. That way, if your phone is in your pocket and you brush a body part against it, it doesn't detect it as a touch or swipe. The problem with a sudden temperature differential (please note, differential, the phone would probably do the same at really hot temperatures) is that it is a similar read to the hardware as "holding an entire body part on the screen".

Many people working in hardware development have had to deal with similar issues at one point. Temperature differentials are very hard to distinguish on these type of hardware from a touch, hence why a lot of 'extreme environment' tools (eg. GPS units etc) still use resistive or infrared touch detection even though it's more expensive and less precise.

With capacitive touch screens, especially multi-touch and pressure-sensitive ones we're talking about plates that are micrometers apart. Temperature still has a physical impact (contraction/expansion) which causes your touch screen to require temperature calibration in software.