How to disable FaceTime gesture reactions in AVCaptureSession

Question

I have found only one question related to Facetime reactions here - Can you access the FaceTime video gesture reactions in code?. In general - you can find a lot of articles on how to disable manually FaceTime reactions in your phone ( must be > iPhone 12 and IOS >= 17). But surprisingly it seems not to work! I was trying to disable these reactions using the given method ( you can read about it here - https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/disable-gesture-based-facetime-reactions/, or here - https://www.paubox.com/blog/how-to-turn-off-the-ios-17-and-macos-sonoma-facetime-reactions). After disabling, reactions do not work in Facetime, but if you check inside the app using the code below :

if #available(iOS 17.0, *) {
    if AVCaptureDevice.reactionEffectsEnabled {
        if AVCaptureDevice.reactionEffectGesturesEnabled {
            return true
        }
    }
} else {
    return false
}

you will notice that even if reactions are disabled this code returns true, and if you start the recording session using AVCaptureSession() you will see the FaceTime reactions. That's weird, I can not understand what I can do, especially since my client wants to have this disabled, as the application context is far away from such expressions.

Any advice would be appreciated.

I suppose there must be a method to disable FaceTime reactions in my application's video stream, but - to be honest - I am not able to found a solution.

Answer 1

As of iOS 17.1.2

The video gesture effects settings are per app. If you disable it in the FaceTime app, it won't also be disabled in your app.

You have to start a video session within your app, then go disable the gesture effects in Control Center; the "Video Effects" button does not appear in Control Center until you start a video session.

And even though it is a "per app" setting, there is no switch to enable or disable it in the Settings app under your app's settings, so you cannot give your user a link to your Settings screen to tell them to disable it; you have to tell them to use Control Center.

(I think every developer agrees -- Apple really dropped the ball on the APIs and implementation of this "feature" for third party apps. Here's hoping they improve it in future OS releases.)