Touch Disease, Bend-Gate: Paralyzing Problems Of iPhone 6 And 6 Plus, Can Apple Fix It?

If you are an iPhone user, then someone may have already warned you about the "Touch Disease." It is an issue causing a flickering grey bar to appear across the top of people's iPhone screen. Experts claim it is a 'ticking time bomb' and it could affect a growing number of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus screens.

When iPhone 6 was released about two years ago, there were a lot of complaints about the phone bending when placed inside their pockets. A third party electronics repair blog in the United States iFixit are reporting an increasing number of incidence of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models malfunction which features the grey flicker bars. This usually causes an unresponsive iPhone or occasionally responsive touch screen, bgr.com reported.

Speaking to iFixit, Jason Villmer, owner of STS Telecom, a board repair shop in Missouri, said: 'This issue is widespread enough that I feel like almost every iPhone 6/6+ has a touch of it (no pun intended) and are like ticking bombs just waiting to act up.'

Apple has not given any information about the problem yet, but it may be caused by faulty touch controllers on the logic board. Electronic experts claim that these controllers are responsible for both the display and the Touch ID fingerprint sensor, so it's no surprise that problems with these features will cause problems with the display and finger input.

According to smh.com, the malfunction has also been widely reported on Apple's own support forums. "[Touch disease] has been creeping up on us," iFixit co-founder Kyle Wiens told Fairfax Media. "I first saw it a year ago but as these phones get older it's getting more and more common." Other electronic experts gave their share of observations regarding the matter. Patrick Lee, a director of repair chain iExperts Sydney, describes the issue as "widespread". "I would estimate that we have seen about 100 cases to date," he said.

Shaun Moffatt, owner of the Sydney mobile phone repairer Fone Fix said he has observed the same problem for first time on an iPhone 6 Plus that was brought to one of his shops for repair a few days ago. Wiens calls the problem "design anorexia," the need to make smartphones ever thinner and lighter.

Meanwhile, "touch disease" is not the only thing that causes users to complain. Mail Online has reported that in 2014 "bend-gate" incident was very common. It was coined the term "bend-gate" when some iPhone 6 Plus owners found that their devices had been bent out of shape after carrying them in their back pockets.

After denying the first few time, and saw how big the issue became, Apple subsequently upgraded the quality of the aluminum used for the casing on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus in what was seen as an indirect admission that the material used in the earlier model was flawed.