Video Playback on iOS 18 is Broken - Video size is small and timeline ends early when setting video to full frame or zooming in. Serious bug.

They ruined Photos and Videos. Playing a video is so tedious and unintuitive now. It opens in a small window and you can’t play a video frame by frame or by dragging it slowly while in full screen. The scroll bar is vague and doesn’t give insight into what time or duration of the video you’re at and there is no thumbnail preview at the bottom. All in all iOS 18 is a downgrade. Virtually everything they did was backwards and makes the UX cringeworthy, time consuming, and limiting. I really hope someone is listening and fixes this in 18.2.

The new videoplayer in photo app is bull sh*t! Looks like android in 2010. This app is impossible to use. All controls have become extremely inconveient! Apple please bring back the old one!

I hate this new interface so much. I liked being able to see my albums, it was much easier to find what I needed. Now it feels like a needle in a haystack. Screenshots aren’t full screen anymore, the edit button took me a while to find and realize it was the edit button. Really feels like a step backwards. I would switch back to iOS 17 if I could merely because I hate the new photos app so much. I only downloaded 18 in order to have access to the satellite texting in case I needed it due to hurricane Milton devastating Florida. PLEASE bring back the old interface for ios18. I post photos and videos online as a source of income, and this new update has made it SO hard to find and organize what I need.

This exact problem has been extremely annoying for me as well. The whole update to the photos app interface has made it far worse and I’m sure most people would agree that having the option to revert the app to it’s pre-iOS18 version would be the best solution.

I absolutely hate the latest update too. The Photos app is absolutely horrific. I can’t stand it! One of the worst issues is definitely with the videos and photos not showing and not playing in full screen, but I was able to fix that by just tapping the video, which makes it to go full screen.

However, doing that makes you lose access to the scrubber—and the new scrubber is awful! I can’t stand it. Apple really needs to get their priorities straight, what are we doing Apple???

Here’s something else to watch out for: I recorded a 20-minute video, but the playback would stop at around 3 minutes every time. I reset my phone, closed the Photos app multiple times, and thought I had lost all my footage. It seemed like the file was corrupted.

I’m not sure if it happened because I used the new pause feature and locked my phone, or if there was some other issue causing the corruption. But iOS 18 has been such a mixed bag—it’s great in some ways but also feels very unfinished and unpolished, which is so unlike Apple. Like it’s ok, just wait a little longer and finish it and make it work right, makes y’all look bad!

Thankfully, I managed to fix the video by importing the clip into an app called VideoShop (it’s a paid app, unfortunately). I’m sure iMovie or another editing app would work too. Once I imported and exported the clip, it worked all the way through. But before exporting, it wouldn’t even play properly in VideoShop. It’s crazy that we have to resort to these workarounds.

Honestly, Apple has been ridiculous lately—it’s genuinely upsetting.

Hope this helps someone.

I tried to use my phone to replay a work conference seminar to take notes and was surprised to see the video interface was totally changed on my work phone. Brentgrab's youtube video exactly demonstrates the problems with the video playback in iOS 18 in the Photos app. The scrubber bar was eliminated; it should return because it is much more intuitive to see where to scrub visually rather than on a blank bar. The viewing screen is by default zoomed out with useless buttons on the sides. If you make the video full screen, you lose the ability to navigate through the video at all. If you zoom into the video and then try to play it again, it only plays the very beginning of the video. The functionality of this part of the OS is totally broken and needs to be restored to the functionality available in the most recent version of iOS 17 as soon as possible.

It also has a delay when you press the pause/mute button in vertical videos.

I’m facing a significant issue with video editing across all apps on my iPhone, including the native Photos app. Whenever I try to rewind or trim a video, it simply doesn't work. For instance, if I rewind to the 3-minute mark, the video stops loading, everything freezes, and I completely lose control. This problem persists not only in the default app but also in every third-party editing app I’ve tried (Instagram, VN, Cutcut). It’s a major setback for me as I rely on my phone for vlogging and content creation, yet I’m currently unable to edit my videos at all. Either the image freezes while the sound continues, or the video doesn’t load properly at all. This issue is severely impacting my ability to work, and it seems like the video editing functionality is entirely broken with the recent update.

This is the feature many of us use more than any other on an iPhone. I was hopeful that the minor version bump to 18.0.1 would fix this really unfortunate experience, but it didn’t.

Apple I’m pretty close to buying a Pixel after this. It’s not just the numerous egregious bugs in this release, it’s the lack of recognition.

You’re the platform that all others emulate. You have seriously lost your edge. The missing AI features are bad enough, but acceptable, but you also ruined features that were previously great. What is going on over there?

Your point is a good one, but remember how much we pay for these devices.

It’s also pretty standard for software companies at this level to have multiple layers of quality and product feedback.

Apple obviously rushed this release, didn’t coordinate effectively and still wants to be on top.

maybe the hyperbolic commentary is over done, but listen to what people are trying to communicate. They feel snubbed, especially because it’s now impossible to install a lower version of iOS.