video player crashing

[kwibuka-confiance-amalitech]

Problem Summary

Our Flutter app has been using the vr_player package for 360 video playback. The app was deployed to production approximately 2-3 months ago and initially functioned without issue. However, after the release of iOS 18, we’ve observed a significant increase in crashes, especially on iOS devices. These crashes happen under specific conditions, notably:

When users play a video in the foreground.
When users move the app to the background while a video is playing.
When users rotate the video player.
These events consistently trigger crashes on various iOS devices running iOS 18, leading us to suspect compatibility issues with the new iOS version. The crashes were not present prior to the iOS update.

Technical Environment

Framework: Flutter
Package: vr_player (version 0.2.2) — (https://pub.dev/packages/vr_player)
iOS Version: iOS 18.0.1
Devices Tested: Various iOS devices (specify models if possible)

Observed Behavior

When performing the steps outlined above on iOS 18, the app crashes without logging a specific error message in Flutter. Based on preliminary logs, it appears that the crash might be related to backgrounding and foregrounding video playback, as well as handling orientation changes.

Hypothesis
Given that the issue started after the iOS 18 release, it’s possible that there are compatibility issues between vr_player and the latest iOS version. Possible causes include:

Background Handling: iOS 18 might have introduced stricter background processing policies affecting media playback.
Rotation Handling: Compatibility issues with rotation and the vr_player package might be triggered by iOS 18’s new rotation handling.
Native Code Issues: Since vr_player relies on native Swift code, there could be compatibility issues with changes in Swift or iOS APIs in iOS 18.

Diagnostic Attempts

Checked for Updates: Verified that both Flutter and vr_player are up-to-date. No newer versions were available at the time of testing.
Analyzed Logs: Examined Flutter and Xcode logs but did not find clear, actionable error messages related to this issue only errors we are getting in Xcode is this SIGABRT error.

[EmreDET]

Can you reproduce this issue on a new flutter project with a minimal code example? I think first you should look if the problem might be in other factors than this package.
Our app for example does not face your issues on any iOS including iOS 18.
Android on the other hand might face some crashes due to low ram or poor optimization / memory leakages.

[viktorshantus]

On IOS it works fine, but when I use it on Android there is a failure when trying to return from a route and the app crashes. Fatal signal 6 (SIGABRT), code -1 (SI_QUEUE) at tid 30413