We're building a simple iPhone app that shows a live view from the rear camera in Picture in Picture while the user is in other apps. The camera feed is only displayed. It's never recorded, stored or transmitted, and the app has no network access.
In testing on an iPhone 15 Pro (iOS 26.6.2) with Xcode 26.6, the camera keeps running behind PiP only when the app declares the voip background mode. Without it, as documented, isMultitaskingCameraAccessSupported is false and the capture session is interrupted with videoDeviceNotAvailableWithMultipleForegroundApps as soon as PiP starts.
Our app isn't a calling app, so we don't want to rely on voip. Two questions:
- Is the com.apple.developer.avfoundation.multitasking-camera-access entitlement available to non-calling apps with a use case like this? If so, how should we request it?
- If not, is there any supported way for a non-calling app to keep a live camera preview running in PiP on iPhone?
I'm happy to share a short screen recording of the prototype.