Significant Uptick in AVCaptureSessionWasInterrupted (Reason 4) Leading to Camera Black Screen and AVError Code -11803

In the latest production release of our iOS app (deployed via the App Store), we’ve observed a significant increase in AVCaptureSessionWasInterrupted notifications where the interruption reason has a rawValue of 4. The session does not automatically recover, even after returning from background or deleting/reinstalling the app. An employee ran into this and was able to get a recording. We see the below error when attempting to take photos.

"Error Domain=AVFoundationErrorDomain Code=-11803 \"Cannot Record\" UserInfo={AVErrorRecordingFailureDomainKey=3, NSLocalizedDescription=Cannot Record, NSLocalizedRecoverySuggestion=Try recording again.}",
}

This interruption causes the camera preview to remain black, and any attempt to capture an image results in a failure with the following error:

Some questions from our team:

  • What common system conditions or foreground app behaviors can cause .videoDeviceNotAvailableWithMultipleForegroundApps (reason 4) to become persistent? Our teams under is under the impression the interruption reason 4 is mostly associated with iPad and PiP, but neither of these are true in the logs we see.
  • Is manual recovery of the session required?
  • Is there a recommended strategy to detect that the session is unrecoverable and gracefully notify the user or rebuild the session?
  • Is there an instrument(s) in XCode you would recommend when trying to evaluate the increase in reason 4?

Best,

Ben

I believe this may have been closely aligned with the 18.4.1 release. Below is a visual of the count over time by OS.

Significant Uptick in AVCaptureSessionWasInterrupted (Reason 4) Leading to Camera Black Screen and AVError Code -11803
 
 
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