We build mobile apps for creators to edit their videos. Post editing the video, the creator has to export the video so that it can be uploaded to Youtube. The export is a time consuming and GPU intensive process. The creator can exit the app due to various reasons like receiving the call, putting the app in background etc. This causes the export to fail :(
Keeping this limitation in mind there was an announcement from Apple that with the IOS 26 launch would start to support background GPU access. Here is the official documentation: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/BundleResources/Entitlements/com.apple.developer.background-tasks.continued-processing.gpu
When we tried using this feature, we were not able to get it to work on IOS 26. We stumbled upon this ticket(https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/797538?answerId=854825022#854825022) in the Apple Developer forum, in which possibly an Apple engineer claims it is supported ONLY for iPadOS 26. This is a very big bummer for us.
96% of the users are on iPhone(compared to iPad), and if we refer to the official documentation above, it claims that this feature should work on IOS 26.
This feature is extremely important for having the best user experience and reducing user frustration and will be useful for other video editing apps.
Looking forward to a resolution.
When we tried using this feature, we were not able to get it to work on iOS 26. We stumbled upon this ticket (https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/797538?answerId=854825022#854825022) in the Apple Developer forum, in which possibly an Apple engineer claims it is supported ONLY for iPadOS 26.
That engineer would be me, and yes, what I said there is correct. Background GPU access is currently only available on iPads.
96% of the users are on iPhone (compared to iPad), and if we refer to the official documentation above, it claims that this feature should work on iOS 26.
What the documentation says is that the APIs themselves are available on iOS and iPadOS and that background GPU access is not available on all devices, both of which are true. This both simplifies the implementation on both platforms and allows for future API evolution without requiring major API revision. This is the same basic pattern most of our APIs use when functionality is only available on some hardware.
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Kevin Elliott
DTS Engineer, CoreOS/Hardware
