Camera app crashing on my iPhone 16 Pro Max

Sara, don't do it! Try rebooting every morning and turn off reduce motion - seems to have worked for my wife. See posts by W3JNP who has worked with Apple and can't say some stuff other than that a fix is coming in a few weeks.

Same here 16Pro phone only a week old. Assume it’s a bug that will get fixed? Not going to wipe and reinstall from scratch either…very annoying restart is the only temporary fix. Phone is overheating also.

When you reset your phone (complete erase...) be careful to pick the option that says something like "erase everything except your e-sim credentials. As you watch the phone resetting and behaving like a "virgin phone", don't restore from backup! Once the phone has "hatched from the egg" (saying hello to you and so forth), get ready to fire up the iphone app store app and begin loading each of the apps it suggests unless you don't need them. In my own case, I downloaded fewer than half of the apps I used to have because I no longer needed them. Good luck on this!

Well, unverified rumors promise a fix in 18.1 or 18.2 or ...

I had enough pain to realize I would be better off with a clean reset, no restore from time machine (no, none, rien...) despite the pain, because it would avoid a lot of bleeding. Once I made that decision, I felt better. And the phone and camera and apps have been working flawlessly ever since.

I worry that Apple does not have the software to examine every time machine uploaded and downloaded a file, looking for malware that somehow escaped their control over the AppStore.

I can't prove it, of course, but I feel confident that there have been thousands upon thousands (and maybe millions upon millions) of iPhones whose timemachine backups contain poisoned software that could have been poisoned by accident (memory corruption) or on purpose (beware of the black arts here).

Apple did this to me once before, maybe 6 to 8 years ago, when my iPhone was crashing but they said it must have been my software! My software? All of my software was downloaded from the Apple app store. They told me the only solution would be to do a complete, clean erase and manually reinstall all the software I had and so forth. Either that or buy a new iPhone and do a fresh install of all the software and whatnot.

I understand how checksums and CRC encoding work. Why doesn't Apple thoroughly test every file on your machine and in your backup to determine where the flaw is coming from? Maybe they've figured out how to fix all these phones and the fix will be delivered before Halloween as a treat for the world. Or maybe not.

I spent the better part of two days doing a complete, clean out and reinstall all my software. Before that, I had spent a part of several days with crashes and restarts and so forth. So the path I suggest above will take time and effort but, in most cases, it should make the pain go away.

It's been 7 days since I wiped my iphone and rebuilt from scratch without restoring the backup. So far so good. The camera has not crashed. I did not lose everything, photos, messages, and other data was backed up to iCloud and brought back down to my phone. BUT, I had to reinstall all apps from the app store one at a time. I spent an hour before hand taking screenshots of everything on my phone to be sure I didn't miss any settings I'd had before. The only thing I forgot was to take screenshots of what was on my Apple Watch because that backup is tied to the phone's backup. So I had to restore my watch as a new watch in addition to the phone.

While the camera has not crashed, I will say the phone is not nearly as responsive as my 14 Pro Max was. Using the Camera Control button feels very sluggish, moreso than just using the Camera shortcut from the lock screen or control center.

Did this fix my issue? I haven't seen the crash since, but I've also seen maybe 2-3 others here posting this method did not work for them. Your mileage may vary. If 18.1 includes a fix for this, that would be great, but I wasn't waiting until the end of the month and I didn't want to install the beta. I'm not disappointed to wipe the phone, I think it's a good practice to do from time to time anyways, maybe every 3rd or 4th phone.

newhampster wrote:

I understand how checksums and CRC encoding work. Why doesn't Apple thoroughly test every file on your machine and in your backup to determine where the flaw is coming from? Maybe they've figured out how to fix all these phones and the fix will be delivered before Halloween as a treat for the world. Or maybe not.

Likely because Apple doesn't have access to your backup to test it. They are fully encrypted. I don't think you want Apple or anyone for that matter to be able to analyze your data at all.

I restored from my iPhone 15 Pro Max to my 16 Pro Max, using QuickStart, which is iPhone to iPhone and seamless. I've also had zero, none, nadda issues with the camera crashing on my phone.

This fix quite an expensive fix and it surprised me, but the camera is working fine again now I’m in Japan on holidays 😄

Switched to Japanese region after arriving and camera is working fine for days now. Maybe somehow related to region based AI restrictions in the software?

A reboot will fix the issue temporarily but if left for any time afterwards the camera will crash again even if it not been used. Such a frustrating experience, constant black screen and flashing stacks.

Apple is a trillion dollar company with over 160,000 employees. So when you speak 'to Apple' I assume you're speaking to Apple Support. They don't necessarily have a direct line to the iOS or iPhone developers, so the 'bad batch' is not necessarily correct and may be an attempt to mollify customers. I have worked as a software developer for similar companies to Apple so I know how it works behind the scenes.

Even if the 'bad batch' is correct, then quite often issues in the hardware can be worked around in the software. I've tried the Greek B (Apple removed my posts mentioning this explicitly) update and it looks like it has fixed the issue. Others have indicated the same. So, at the very least, it has been worked around in the software.

However, the fact that resetting the phone and doing a clean install solves the problem leads me to believe that it is a software issue related to the process of transferring from another phone. I was tempted to go down this route purely to have a clear out and remove any cruft. But experiences of the process vary, so I'm using the not-yet-released update.

HTH.

Yes, "Apple" in my case has been the after-sales and the tech support so of course one is only tapping into whoever takes my call at each time. I ask for a manager to get get to the top of the tree but it's hard work to get to someone with any knowledge in depth.

If this camera crashing problem (does not) happen on most devices - how can that be just a general software issue? Put another way if most iphone16pro's are not suffering this problem how can that be?

If the problem is only happening on some devices then surley that means that 'some devices' are different from others. I would be interested in your thoughts on this.

I took my iPhone 16 pro to return for same problem camera crashing

and you what they told me? “Nobody else have thi problem and this is first time we hear it”

I returned it and I got iphone 16 pro max

and still I have this issue

Doesn't work for me. My 16 Pro has the camera sometimes crash when I take a picture. Black screen for a second or two then the app restarts and works fine. I tried this a couple of days ago and the issue was back that same day. I'm still dealing with fallout of resetting my settings, random stuff not working, etc. Was not worth it for the issue to still be there. Definitely not resetting and reinstalling as a new phone like other people have said.

I'm stuck with this phone, unfortunately. Worst iPhone I've had, and I had the OG iPhone and every one since the 5s after that.

yes, all iCloud data that are checked in Settings> your Account> icloud> saved to icloud loaded fine. for me it included photos, icloud drive, icloud mail only, password keychains, notes, messages, health, contacts, reminders, wallet, game center, shortcuts and other apps. I checked everything in there and synced them up with icloud.

Following are the tasks I had to do manually:

1) Mail - create all mailboxes (I had the passwords saved in vaults like passwords, authenticator app, chrome)

2) Install all the apps this is painful but again saving my passwords in the the vaults helped be login faster - I am on apple upgrade program and iCloud+ user so really never deleted any app since iphone 13, this exercise made me not install many apps that I never used since years. But i still had to spend time remembering and installing all the needed apps.

3) I had several wallpapers and all of them are gone.

4) If you are using authenticator app for work or personal use, you may lose them, I had to setup everything again. It was painful for me since.

Vanillabarr1909 wrote:

I’m wondering if not as much the camera, as the photo gallery software update? I’m have major problems with this , and the software coding may be affecting the camera? Anyone else?

No. They are completely unrelated. I've gotten used to the Photos app and am actually learning to like it. But it has nothing to do with the camera app.