iPhone 11 Pro Max camera shows black screen when scanning

I also have this problem. And it usually initiates within a third-party app utilizing the camera feature. But once it goes, black screen, the camera is not viewable from any apps, including the Apple camera app itself Only fixes a reboot. Has been plugging me since iOS 26. Currently on iOS 26.2 and still no fix. I’m starting to suspect this issue is coming from a memory‑management bug in the iOS camera subsystem. The analytics logs show that the small camera extensions used by apps like Walmart Pay, Messages, and other QR/scan utilities are repeatedly getting killed for exceeding their ~170 MB memory limit, even though they’re only doing lightweight camera tasks. That pattern suggests the underlying camera service is slowly leaking or over‑allocating memory over several days of uptime, pushing these extensions over their cap. After enough of those crashes build up, the main camera daemon itself becomes unstable, which lines up with the Camera app freezing or refusing to open. Everything in the logs points to a software‑level issue rather than hardware.

this points to a software problem. However, let me be clear, this could only be affecting a small subset of users. (For example people on iPhone 16+ only, people utilizing abs in a certain sequence or order., Etc..).

generally occurs for me about every five days or so and I have to do a phone reboot to fix

Reset the iPhone camera system cache (without erasing data)

iOS does not provide a way to do this.