While working on a heart rate measurement app (photoplethysmography via camera), we faced systematic err=-17281 (FigCaptureSourceRemote) issues on real devices starting from iOS 17+, and the problem became more noticeable after iOS 26.
The error often appeared during AVCaptureSession initialization or when restarting capture, especially under high frame rates (30-60 FPS) and frequent foreground/background transitions.
Root cause (our understanding):
Camera hardware/session not fully released after previous use
Race conditions between session teardown and new setup
Changes in AVFoundation capture pipeline in recent iOS versions
Our solution:
Instead of blocking delays, we implemented asynchronous retry logic with explicit hardware readiness check via AVCaptureDevice.lockForConfiguration().
Topic:
App & System Services
SubTopic:
Core OS
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