It's not a hardware issue. It's every single phone I've seen running ios10. As soon as I updated my iPad it turned to mudd.
Yep, this is true. As soon as I downgraded back to iOS 9, my wallpaper is normal again \o/
When I first started iOS 10 beta, there was a lot more darkening than normal. It was awful. When the next beta update came I Reset All Settings. That fixed it back to normal. I wish they would do away with the darkening all together. I'm on 10.1 beta and it still looks normal. If you're waiting for Apple to fix something, it won't happen. Reset All Settings did fix it for me.
Thank you for reporting back. I remember doing a hard reset more than once because I hated how it looked.I tried that twice on my phone and iPad. It didn't work at all.
I tried that twice on my phone and iPad. It didn't work at all.
If you're stuck with a darker than usual screen due to Apple darkening it, you can leave Apple feedback here:
Feedback
https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html#mn_p
Or use dark theme wallpapers.
Glad to know it's not just me. I got my phone a week ago and it updated to 10.0.2 the same day I got it. I thought maybe something was wrong with my particular phone and I might need to take it back. I think I'll try the reset all settings fix. Thanks for sharing that.
Thank you. I sent feedback. I had no darkening whatsoever with ios9. Every one of my devices now running ios10 are significantly darker. This includes 3 iPhone 6s's, one 6s plus and two iPad Air 2's, not to mention all the demo iPhone 7's I've looked at. An Apple Store employee has noticed it too and had no explanation. I've sent the feedback to Apple.
The darkening depends on the color and shade of the wallpapers. It's been on all the phone's a long time. Here's a comparison I did about 2 years ago on my iPhone 5. On the left is the wallpaper, the right is the screen.
//uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20161009/a76cb5d5b0901c776535fef8b6985875.jpg
I see the difference there too. I didn't notice the lock screen-home screen difference on mine because I have different wallpapers on each one. But definitely a difference!
I did submit feedback to Apple as CyreneK suggested.