It turns out that the issue is memory related. I found an old Apple TV (and original devkit) on which the issue occurs. The app is exhausting memory at start up. So I have some sleuthing to do.

Thanks for that suggestion. I've been watching that space avidly. Nothing showing up thus far.

I have submitted feedback for the same issue.

I loved this idea of using the black sprite node however it still presented issues for me when transitioning between two "scenes" that contain SKTileMapNodes. So what I do is have a wrapper node that is a subclass of SKSpriteNode. When I want a tiled background, I create an instance of this class that internally creates an SKTileMapNode that is never actually presented. Once that SKTileMapNode is created, I then create a texture from it and initialise my wrapper object using that texture. From then on, it is a simple SKSpriteNode that obeys the alpha like all good SpriteKit nodes should, and I don't have to do any fiddles with black nodes. p.s. I can't believe (though I should by now) that Apple have not been able to bring themselves to fix this after 6 years.