iPhone SE has intermittent touch problems

[slapple]

I have an iPhone SE and a half hour ago I noticed the touch screen wasn't responding at all. The power button and home buttons still worked, but touching/swiping didn't. I had to do a hard reboot, and then touching worked fine.

A few minutes ago, I noticed touching stopped working again. After using the power button to lock the screen and the home button to unlock it, touching worked for about a minute. Then I locked the phone, unlocked it again, and touching stopped working again.

What is going on? I've only had my phone sitting on the charger for most of the day, and I never dropped it. This is the first time I ever experienced this, and the phone is about 2.5 years old. I didn't do any iOS updates in a while. I'm on iOS 12.4.1.

 

[maxjohnson2]

I remembered using the SE with some third party charger they interfered with the touchscreen and I had to unplug it.

But it's an old phone, could just be the digitizer is going. Might just need a screen replacement. You could try rebooting and upgrading the device.

 

[slapple]

I noticed over a year ago that the screen doesn't sit perfectly flush with the frame. If I press on the corners of the top of the screen, I can see that it goes down into the frame a bit. But still I never had any problems with the phone until now. I read somewhere else that the unresponsiveness will happen if the frame is slightly bent.

I have an appointment with Apple to replace the screen. Does Apple replace iPhone frames too? Wouldn't want the new screen to become unresponsive later.

 

[Lekro]

That does indeed happen. I’ve seen many examples when someone dropped an SE or a 5S, crushed a corner on the frame, the glass or the lcd didn’t break, but the digitiser was gone and there was no touch input.

The 5S/SE screen is sensitive to this compared to other models.

If your frame is bent, the new screen probably won’t go in and Apple will quote you for a replacement device price.