Camera Access Issues in iOS PWA/Home Screen Apps

On iOS, a web app can stored on the phone using the 'Add to Home Screen' option. This turns it into a PWA (Progressive Web App) and enables offline use cases.

Reliability Issues

Unfortunately, WebKit (Safari) on iOS has been plagued by frequent issues around camera access when web apps are launched in PWA mode.

If you are encountering camera access issues in PWA:

  • Make sure the device is running the latest version of iOS.
  • Restart the phone.

If the issue persists, consider the following workarounds:

  • Use the app directly in Safari instead of installing it as a PWA.
  • Remove the apple-mobile-web-app-capable meta tag from the HTML, forcing the app to run in Safari, yet still accessible via the Home Screen.

Camera Permission Not Persisted

When the SDK accesses the camera to scan barcodes, the user is prompted for permission to access the camera. Unfortunately the user's decision to allow camera access is not persisted for PWAs.

At the time of writing, the only workaround is to allow blanket camera access to Safari, which we generally recommend against, due to the security implications of allowing every web app to access the camera.

See this issue on the Safari bug tracker for details: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215884

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