Green or pink vertical lines on your screen.

What's actually happening

Modern phones use OLED (or AMOLED) displays. The image is driven by an incredibly fine grid of connections along the edges of the panel and a ribbon cable — the display flex — that carries the signal into the phone's logic board. Green or pink vertical lines appear when that grid or that connection is physically damaged: the panel can no longer address a column of pixels correctly, so it drives them to a default state, which on most OLED panels reads as a bright green or magenta line.

It is, mechanically, the same class of failure as a cracked screen — just internal. You often won't see any glass damage at all, which is why it's so confusing. The phone works, the touch works, but there's a stripe of colour that won't go away.

The most common triggers

• A drop or knock — even one that didn't crack the glass. The impact flexes the panel just enough to fracture the internal connection.
• Pressure — sitting on the phone, an overstuffed pocket, or a tight bag squeezing the screen against something hard.
• Heat and time — a left-in-a-hot-car cycle, or simply an ageing panel where the flex bond degrades. This is why lines sometimes appear "out of nowhere" with no drop.
• Coincidental timing with an update — this is the big one. A lot of people see lines appear right after an iOS or Android update and blame the software. The update didn't cause it; the panel was already failing and the reboot during the update is simply when you next looked closely. We see this misattribution constantly.

How to confirm it's the screen (60 seconds)

You can rule out the rare software-ish causes quickly. None of these will fix a damaged panel — they only confirm the diagnosis so you don't waste money or a repair trip on the wrong thing.

• Force-restart the phone. If the lines survive a full restart, it's hardware. (They will.)
• Take a screenshot and view it on another device. If the lines are not in the screenshot, the panel is the problem — the phone is rendering a clean image, the screen just can't display it. This is the definitive test.
• Try safe mode (Android) briefly. If lines persist in safe mode, it's not an app. (It won't be.)

If the screenshot looks perfect on another screen, stop testing. That single result confirms it's the display hardware, full stop. There is no setting, update, or reset that brings a fractured OLED back.

What it costs to fix

Because the panel is the failed part, this is a full screen (OLED) replacement — the same job and roughly the same price as fixing a badly cracked screen, not the cheaper "glass only" service some shops advertise for minor cracks. As a 2026 Australian independent-shop guide:

• Smaller / older iPhones & mid-range Androids: roughly $180–$280
• Recent flagship iPhones (Pro models): roughly $270–$420
• Curved-screen Samsung flagships (S Ultra line): roughly $300–$490 — curved AMOLED is the most expensive panel to replace

Authorised manufacturer service is typically 30–55% above these figures and usually means sending the phone away for several days. For an exact figure for your specific model, our repair cost calculator and the individual model pages have per-device ranges.

Is it worth fixing?

Honest rule of thumb: if the repair is less than roughly 40% of what the phone is currently worth second-hand, fixing it is usually the sensible call — a screen replacement otherwise restores the phone fully. If you've got an older device where a $250 screen is most of its resale value, that money is often better put toward replacement. A good shop will tell you this rather than just taking the job; if they don't, that tells you something about the shop.

DIY, honestly

We're not going to walk you through a teardown. Replacing an OLED assembly means heat, adhesive, prying a fragile panel, transferring small components, and on many models re-pairing parts so features like True Tone or under-display fingerprint keep working. The panel is the single most expensive part in the phone, and the most common DIY outcome on this specific repair is a second damaged screen and a bigger bill than if you'd gone to a shop first.

This is one where the technician-honest answer is: this is a shop job for almost everyone. Not because it's impossible, but because the cost of getting it wrong is the most expensive part on the device.

Common questions