Issue with "Taking still photos with getUserMedia()": Doesn't work on the iPhone

[tptech]

MDN URL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebRTC_API/Taking_still_photos

What information was incorrect, unhelpful, or incomplete?

This is a great example; thank you.

The only problem with this example (not of your making, I suspect) is that it doesn't work on an iPhone. I want to use this kind of functionality on my website, but the main browser client for our customers is the iPhone, and it just doesn't work.

On the iPhone (Safari, iOS 14.7.1) I get a black box for the video input, and a single frame capture when clicking the "Take photo" button from when the webpage loads, but then the image never updates thereafter.

I've hunted all over the Interwebs, and posted questions on a number of technical question/answer sites, but have yet to get any insight into why this code doesn't work on the iPhone. (The only hint I've seen is a conspiracy theory about Apple not wanting to support this functionality on the iPhone.)

So, do you good, and knowledgeable folk have any insight into why this doesn't work on the iPhone? The MDN compatibility tables suggest that it should work on the iPhone.

By the way, it does work on the iPad (Safari, iPadOS 14.7.1) ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Specific section or headline?

The problem is with the code solution … so, the code samples, and the GitHub repository, I guess.

What did you expect to see?

I expected the code to work as specified; as it does on Chrome. Firefox, iPad, … Nobody appears to be talking about it.

Did you test this? If so, how?

I created a CodePen here, a copy of the GitHub repository code, and tried it out.

MDN Content page report details

• Folder: en-us/web/api/webrtc_api/taking_still_photos
• MDN URL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebRTC_API/Taking_still_photos
• GitHub URL: https://github.com/mdn/content/blob/main/files/en-us/web/api/webrtc_api/taking_still_photos/index.html
• Last commit: 4415f1b
• Document last modified: 2021-07-24T08:03:56.000Z

[sideshowbarker]

I’ve confirmed that what the issue description says is still accurate as of iOS 15.5 on the iPhone — but I don’t have any idea myself why it doesn’t work as expected on the iPhone.