CameraView not working on Release mode Android nor iOS

[MCutrin]

Hello everyone, and thank you in advance for taking the time to read my question.

I have a situation I can’t seem to resolve with the MAUI Toolkit CameraView package, so I’m hoping someone from this community might be able to help me.

Here’s the issue: I’m using the CommunityToolkit.Maui.Camera package to have a constant camera feed and take pictures. I’ve set everything up correctly, and this part of the app works perfectly in Debug mode, both on iOS and Android. However, when running the app in Release mode on either platform, trying to access the page where the CameraView starts does nothing. The app doesn’t crash, no error appears—simply, when pressing the button that in Debug opens the CameraView page, nothing happens.

Given this, and after searching for information about the problem, I tried several configuration changes in the .csproj file, such as disabling the linker, changing the AOT mode, disabling R8 in Android, etc., but none of them worked.

I also created a test project where the only thing I added was the CommunityToolkit.Maui.Camera package in the main page, just to rule out issues in my full project (like incompatibilities that could be breaking the CameraView). But with this “blank” project the same thing happens: in Debug the app runs without issues and the CameraView is shown as soon as the app starts, but in Release mode, after the splash screen, the app closes automatically.

I’m linking that test project here so the issue can be reproduced.

As a last attempt to figure out what’s happening, I ran an adb logcat analysis at the moment of the crash, but the only relevant info I found was:

AndroidRuntime: Process: com.mycompany.TestCameraView, PID: 1082 
AndroidRuntime:        at TestCameraView.MainPage.InitializeComponent + 0x182(Unknown Source)
AndroidRuntime:        at TestCameraView.MainPage..ctor + 0x6(Unknown Source)

I wasn’t able to interpret whether this points to the root cause.

According to ChatGPT (since I don't have the knowledge to interpret this information), the crash happens before my C# code executes, so it's not permissions or initialization: it's that the linker/AOT has removed or modified something that the XAML expects to find.

If anyone has experienced this issue (or something similar), I’d really appreciate any help or guidance.

Thanks again!

[ghost]

@MCutrin let me know which step would you like to take to test and I can help you with help/guidance.

CoPilot:
You’ve done a really thorough job narrowing this down 👏 — and you’re not alone. Others have run into the exact same issue with CommunityToolkit.Maui.Camera: it works fine in Debug, but in Release the app either silently closes or the page never loads.

Here’s what’s going on and how to fix it:

🔹 Why it happens
In Release mode, the linker and AOT compiler aggressively strip out unused code and metadata to shrink the app.

The CameraView control relies on reflection and generated XAML bindings, which the linker doesn’t always recognize as “in use.”

As a result, required types or members get removed, so when InitializeComponent() runs, it can’t find what it needs → crash before your code executes.

This matches exactly what your adb logcat showed: the failure happens inside MainPage.InitializeComponent.

🔹 Fixes / Workarounds
Preserve the CameraView assembly Add this to your MauiProgram.cs before builder.Build():

using CommunityToolkit.Maui.Views; // or Camera depending on namespace

builder.ConfigureMauiHandlers(handlers =>
{
    handlers.AddHandler<CameraView, CameraViewHandler>();
});

// Ensure linker doesn’t strip it
Microsoft.Maui.Controls.Internals.PreserveAttribute preserve =
    new Microsoft.Maui.Controls.Internals.PreserveAttribute();
Or add an assembly-level preserve:

[assembly: Preserve(AllMembers = true)]
for the CommunityToolkit.Maui.Camera namespace.

Update your .csproj to relax linking In your .csproj, under the Android/iOS property groups, try:

xml

<MauiLinkMode>None</MauiLinkMode>
<RunAOTCompilation>false</RunAOTCompilation>

This disables aggressive stripping. If this fixes it, you can then re‑enable linking selectively with a linker.xml file.

Use a linker.xml file Create a linker.xml in your project root:

xml

<linker>
  <assembly fullname="CommunityToolkit.Maui.Camera">
    <type fullname="*" preserve="all"/>
  </assembly>
</linker>

Then in .csproj:

xml

<ItemGroup>
  <AndroidLinkDescription Include="linker.xml" />
</ItemGroup>

This tells the linker to keep everything in that assembly.

Check package version Make sure you’re on the latest CommunityToolkit.Maui.Camera. There have been fixes related to Release builds. The GitHub discussion confirms this exact issue is being tracked.

✅ Bottom line
This isn’t a permissions or initialization bug — it’s the linker stripping out CameraView internals in Release. The most reliable fix is to preserve the assembly (via [Preserve] or linker.xml). Once you do that, your Release build should behave like Debug.

[MCutrin]

Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation 🙏.

I had already tried most of those workarounds (and just in case I re-tested them now), but unfortunately none of them solve the issue in my case:

• Added the handler explicitly in MauiProgram.cs

• Applied [Preserve(AllMembers = true)] at assembly level

• Disabled/enabled linker with None and RunAOTCompilation settings

• Added a linker.xml including the whole CommunityToolkit.Maui.Camera assembly

• Updated to the latest CommunityToolkit.Maui.Camera version

Even after all that, the behavior is exactly the same: works fine in Debug, but in Release the app does nothing when trying to navigate to the page with CameraView.

So it seems there’s something else going on beyond just the linker stripping.

Do you know if there are any additional diagnostics or steps I can try to narrow this further?

[ghost]

I do not know. Can you copy paste this discussion to CoPilot or any other AI, it has more suggestions which I have not tested myself. Did you find any good options?