Ios 14.4 ipad black screen

MacOSX and iOS
5

This appears to be an Apple bug in iPadOS 14.4 - I was able to reproduce the problem in a pure Obj-C app with no JUCE code.

If you disable the app’s status bar by overriding your ViewController’s prefersStatusBarHidden property to YES, then add a subview to the root view which contains an AVPlayer, then the root view will disappear (but strangely only when the native transport controls of the player fade out).

ViewController.h:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
#import <AVFoundation/AVFoundation.h>
#import <AVKit/AVKit.h>

@interface ViewController : UIViewController
{
    AVPlayerViewController* playerViewController;
}

@end

ViewController.m:

#import "ViewController.h"

@interface ViewController ()

@end

@implementation ViewController

- (BOOL) prefersStatusBarHidden
{
    return YES;
}

- (void) viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];
    
    CGRect r = CGRectMake (0, 0, 500, 500);
    
    UIView* v = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame: r];
    [v setBackgroundColor: [UIColor redColor]];
    
    playerViewController = [AVPlayerViewController new];
    NSURL* videoURL = [NSURL URLWithString: @"https://www.rmp-streaming.com/media/bbb-360p.mp4"];
    AVPlayer* player = [AVPlayer playerWithURL: videoURL];
    playerViewController.player = player;
    [player play];
    [v addSubview: [playerViewController view]];
    [[playerViewController view] setFrame: CGRectMake (200, 200, 200, 200)];
    
    [self setView: v];
}

@end

I’ve submitted a bug report to Apple, but in the meantime you can work around this by enabling the status bar in your app by setting UIStatusBarHidden to NO in the app’s .plist.

3 Likes