iOS 11’s Camera app could finally let you pause and resume video recording

It irks me a lot to think that Apple’s Camera app for iPhone and iPad still lacks the Pause and Resume features when shooting video. That being said, Apple could address this glaring omission in the coming weeks, as first noted by iOS developer Daniel Niyazov.

Last week, he tweeted out a screenshot showing some code strings that mention the Pause and Resume capabilities in the camera framework. It’s unclear if the feature might be related to new hardware (iPhone 8?) or if older iPhones will support it as well.

I asked Daniel about it on Twitter and he responded by saying, ”Didn’t see anything indicating it being a hardware thing”.

I’m not a programmer so there’s that, but I do trust Daniel’s insight—thanks to his analysis of the HomePod firmware, we now know that iPhone 8’s 3D face scanner could potentially be used for authenticating Apple Pay transactions.

As a matter of fact, Dan advised me against taking recent findings that iPhone 8’s front-facing camera may capture video in 4K resolution at sixty frames per second  at face value because, as he pointed out, the firmware files also reference a telephoto lens for the front camera and Pearl ID (Apple’s code-name for an upcoming 3D facial recognition feature) on the rear camera.

“I wouldn’t count on the front-facing camera supporting 4K,” he said on Twitter.

No matter how you look at it, it’s annoying that Apple to this date has not implemented the Pause and Resume features for the Camera app. When capturing video, of course I want to pause recording for a few seconds and then resume recording.

Please don’t tell me to choose the Video option in the Camera app and tap the Shutter button to start and stop recording—what I want is the ability to create one continuous video with many different scenes versus splicing together a number of separate videos in an editing app.

If you ask me (and other iPhone photography fans), this is a must-have feature, one that’s found on even the most basic of camcorders.

That iPhones don’t support it yet is really, really surprising.

While Apple’s software lacks this feature, the hardware certainly supports it—as evidenced by a few camera apps on App Store such as VideoCam+ and some jailbreak tweaks that enable this feature in the stock Camera app, like RecordPause.