If there's an active call, which allows recording while in the background there's always a red bar at the top of the screen while the phone is recording.

If there's not, the app looses access to the camera while the app is backgrounded/the phone is locked.

I understand an app losing access to the camera in the background is a security feature. But, it is also really annoying when you want the person to see you while you’re doing something else on your screen.

One feature that’s been in the iPad for a few years and coming to the iPhone in the fall is picture in picture where a video call doesn’t take up the entire screen and as long as PIP is enabled, you can have your video call minimized and do something else.

I'm curious too. I assume it's better, but I don't know firsthand. I tried googling it and every result was about manually opening the Camera app from your lockscreen.

Some other comments here seem to indicate (at least in recent models?) that it's a visual indicator light on the phone that the camera/mic is being accessed. That might be sufficient, although I might also like a small audio cue on lock (or camera engage/disengage while locked).

Unfortunately, I doubt Android will ever be able to rely on a separate visual indicator of recording, since that's another hardware component and probably hard (if not impossible) for Android to enforce.

This seems like an area where regulations would be helpful. All persistently internet connected mobile devices with cameras must have one hardware activated status LED per camera, visible to the user. Same should go for microphones actually.

The visual indicator is only in beta right now, but it will be coming to all iPhones 6s and newer in the fall.

I remember in the old Nokia days and early android days when the camera shutter sound couldn’t be disabled (peeping Tom rules) adding an indicator similar to what webcams have could be possible heck you could potentially use the flash LED on its lowest setting.

Some phones don't have such fine grained control over the flash, in my case (Galaxy Note 10+) it still is like a flashbang.

Also not an iOS developer, but I think that apps enter a “suspended” stage when you close them or press the power button to save battery life. If you look at apps’ crash logs, you can see that they are occasionally killed by a system process for using too much CPU or other resources when they’re in the background.

There are definitely constraints on background activity, but I don't know for sure whether that applies to the camera, and I don't know what its precise relation is to the screen being locked

Even the Apple Watch remote camera app asks you to unlock the phone first so it seems like it’s not possible.

You are hit with popups asking for permission.