iPhone makes shutter sound when taking photos despite being on mute

Question

I recently purchased a refurbished iPhone 6. It's been set up from my old device's iCloud backup and updated to iOS 10.2.1.

Unfortunately, despite being set to silent via the physical mute switch, my iPhone will make a shutter sound whenever I take a photo using the built in camera. I'm using my device in the United States, so country laws shouldn't be an issue.

Why would an iPhone camera be making a shutter sound while set to silent?

Edit: Worth noting that using the mute switch worked for my last iPhone

Answer 1

It is possible the refurbished unit originated from Japan or Korea, where the setting of the mute switch is deliberately ignored by the Camera app. See this article at engadget.

Answer 2

According to this article about turning off the shutter sound:

For those in the United States, turning off the camera sound is illegal, as the law states that cell phones containing digital cameras must make a sound when taking a picture.

You should be able to turn the sound off by pressing the volume down button all the way until it goes into vibrate mode. It looks like you could have done that already.

At this point, your options are

1. Use a 3rd-party camera app that allows you to control the shutter sound.
2. Use Assistive Touch to disable the sound prior to taking a picture.
   1. Go to Settings -> General -> Accessibility
   2. Scroll to the bottom and select Accessibility Shortcut -> AssistiveTouch.
   3. Back-out of that menu item so you're in Accessibility again. Scroll up and select AssistiveTouch and turn it on.
   4. Enter Customize Top Level Menu and remove icons until there's only one left. Tap that icon and select Mute (if you leave two or more icons here it will not work).

According to that site:

When you triple-click the home button, a small floating AssistiveTouch button will appear on the screen. When you press it, the system sound will be muted completely, including the camera shutter sound and alarm. Pressing the AssistiveTouch button again will re-enable the system sound, and triple-clicking the home button will hide the AssistiveTouch button.

Answer 3

You can use camera app B612 to take photo without sound. Because in B612 have option to mute sound camera.