Does the iOS 26 Lens Cleaning Hint Work?

I was looking for a tip to write for our TidBITS Content Network subscribers recently, and I remembered that iOS 26 added a feature that promised to alert you if your iPhone’s lens needed cleaning. Indeed, in the PDF listing all iOS 26 features, there it is, with a footnote that says it applies only to the iPhone 15 and later:

Lens cleaning hint
Camera will detect if the lens is smudged and display a message recommending cleaning it for the clearest possible photo.

The feature is on by default, but if you don’t want these reminders for some reason (a lens that you know is scratched but aren’t fixing?), you can turn them off in Settings > Camera > Lens Cleaning Hints.

Great! But before I started writing the tip, I thought the screenshot would be better as a two-up illustration, with one screenshot showing the message suggesting that I clean the screen. So I smudged the lenses on my iPhone 17 with fingerprints. But no message appeared.

That sent me down to the kitchen to find something else that would smudge the lens more seriously. I dismissed anything greasy, like olive oil or salad dressing, that would make cleaning the lens after the test difficult. After casting around briefly, I saw a bowl of cherry tomatoes—perfect! I cut one in half and smeared its juices all over both lenses, complete with some seeds. (Yes, I subsequently ate the tomato.)

Shockingly, when I opened the Camera app to take a picture, no message appeared, even though the resulting photo was an impressionistic masterpiece. I call it Landscape with Solanum Occlusion. If that doesn’t count as smudged, I don’t know what would.

Curious as to whether this feature has worked for anyone, I did some searching and found a few posts, news articles, and YouTube videos that show the “Clean the camera lens” message appearing at the top of the Camera app’s viewfinder (though several were from the beta). So the feature has worked for some people in some situations, though no one was forthcoming about how they triggered it.

Fearing my fingerprint test was too subtle and the tomato smear too extreme, I wondered if a light dusting of flour might hit the sweet spot. It didn’t—no message appeared. I’m not alone. Most of the videos I watched about the feature either failed to trigger the message or didn’t even attempt to show it, though only a few presenters acknowledged that fact.

I give up. I can’t say that the lens cleaning hint feature is categorically broken, but I can say with some assurance that it doesn’t work on my iPhone 17 running iOS 26.5.1. Let us know in the comments if you’ve ever seen this message or if you can get it to appear reproducibly on your iPhone.