Hello Apple Developer Community,
I'm seeing a persistent crash in my iOS app reported via Firebase Crashlytics. The issue only started appearing on devices running iOS 26.3.0 and above (the crash does not occur on lower iOS versions, and it's unrelated to my app's version number).
Key points:
- My app does NOT use any Text-to-Speech (TTS) features whatsoever. No AVSpeechSynthesizer, no Speech framework, no related APIs called from our code.
- My app is primarily written in Objective-C (with some Swift components possibly via dependencies).
- The crash stack is entirely within Apple's private TextToSpeech framework, specifically in
ausdk::BufferAllocator::instance(). - I suspect it might be indirectly triggered by a third-party ad SDK (e.g., Google Mobile Ads, AppLovin, etc.) that could be loading or interacting with accessibility features in the background — but this is just a hypothesis, as I have no direct evidence yet.
Here is one representative crash log:
Crashed: com.apple.root.user-initiated-qos.cooperative 0 TextToSpeech 0x6bb00 ausdk::BufferAllocator::instance() + 99800 1 TextToSpeech 0xf8c60 ausdk::BufferAllocator::instance() + 677688 2 TextToSpeech 0xf8c60 ausdk::BufferAllocator::instance() + 677688 3 TextToSpeech 0x1a0b9c ausdk::BufferAllocator::instance() + 1365620 4 libswift_Concurrency.dylib 0x628b4 swift::runJobInEstablishedExecutorContext(swift::Job*) + 288 5 libswift_Concurrency.dylib 0x63d28 swift_job_runImpl(swift::Job*, swift::SerialExecutorRef) + 156 6 libdispatch.dylib 0x13f48 _dispatch_root_queue_drain + 364 7 libdispatch.dylib 0x146fc _dispatch_worker_thread2 + 180 8 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x137c _pthread_wqthread + 232 9 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x8c0 start_wqthread + 8
The crash occurs on a background cooperative queue (Swift Concurrency).
Questions:
- Has anyone else seen crashes inside
ausdk::BufferAllocator::instance()in TextToSpeech on iOS 26.3.0+ even without using TTS in their app? - Could a third-party ad SDK be causing the TextToSpeech framework to load unexpectedly (e.g., via accessibility preloading)?
- Is this a known bug in iOS 26's Spoken Content / Speak Selection features? Any workarounds or fixes from Apple?
Any insights, similar reports (especially from Objective-C based apps), or advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!