Bug 282327 – Camera doesn't start in PWA

• Component: Media
• Status: NEW

[Danny Moerkerke]

Created attachment 473078 [details]
screen recording of the camera not starting.

When trying to start the camera with getUserMedia, the camera starts up as shown by the red indicator in the top left of the screen but after a few seconds it closes and no stream is returned, nor an error is reported.

When I restart my iPhone, the problem goes away but returns after a while.

To reproduce:

1. navigate to https://whatpwacando.today/ and install the app to the Home Screen
2. start the app and tap the Media capture demo
3. click the "+" button in the bottom left of the webcam component in the page
4. either the camera starts and getUserMedia returns a stream or nothing happens and the camera indicator in the top left of the screen disappears again.
5. if the camera doesn't start, restarting the device will fix the issue but it returns some time later.

I attached a video recording of the issue.

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/139350708>

+1 on this

I can confirm observing a similar issue on iPhone but not necessarily with PWA. Specifically, I encounter the error: A MediaStreamTrack ended due to a capture failure immediately after calling the getUserMedia method. The iPhone fails to open the camera on any website that utilizes it: for example this sample: https://webrtc.github.io/samples/src/content/getusermedia/gum/.

Interestingly, as you mentioned, after a few device restarts and waiting a few hours, the issue resolved itself.

This bug potentially impacts a significant number of users. In our case, ~200k iPhone users a month access an app we developed that relies on getUserMedia, and we estimate that ~1% of them get a "MediaStreamTrack ended" event right after the getUserMedia method and fail to open the camera.

+1 thought that upgradig to 18.2 fixed the issue but after a while it came back.

This issue still persists in version 18.5. It appears to be specific to PWAs—getUserMedia returns a stream when accessed directly in Safari, but not when the web app is launched from the home screen. A fix would be greatly appreciated, as many of our users rely on this feature.

[youenn fablet]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=284232 should have helped a lot but the fix shipped in iOS 18.4.

I tried locally and I was not able to reproduce yet.
Can you send me a sysdiagnose privately ([e-mail]) with the time where the issue happens in iOS 18.5?