An Apple engineer has provided me the following explanation:The app could not communicate with a helper application (i.e. the photo library). The most common reason that assetsd might crash is because the foreground app is using a lot of memory (or allocating memory very quickly), and the system decides to terminate assetsd to alleviate some of that memory pressure.To prevent these errors, you should make sure that your app is not triggering a high memory pressure situation.This should only be a temporary issue. In other words, if you tried to submit the same request later, it may work (assuming that any high memory pressure situation has been resolved). So, I recommend that you queue up requests that fail and try to submit them later, and inform your user of this in some way, so that they know the save has not gone through yet.This same issue can also create an error with the code 4099, domain NSCocoaErrorDomain and the description:Couldn’t communicate with a helper application.

Have you ever found a solution for this?

Same issue here with an iPhone 12 mini. Not quite a minute but way longer than any other device.

Thanks for the heads up. The bug is still present in iOS 15.1 beta 4. Any idea for a workaround?

This bug isn't fixed in the 15.1 RC, and there doesn't seem to be a workaround. This breaks essential functionality in my app. Oof. I don't look forward to the upcoming support requests and angry customer reviews in the App Store.

It looks like this issue is fixed in iOS 15.2 beta 2.

I'm offering two free educational apps with in-app purchases in the App Store. I regularly see educational downloads for both of these apps and I know from feedback from teachers that the apps are used in lessons, but that they apparently cannot do in-app purchases. For that reason I created separate paid versions of these apps without in-app purchases, as you're suggesting. This approach works well for me, and I'm seeing many educational purchases of that paid version of the app. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem a way to make an app available only for educational institutions, so the paid version will be visible on the App Store, too. So make sure that you're explicitly declaring that new app as an educational version and put an explanation in the App Store description (I'd recommend using a modified app icon, too), otherwise it might confuse other users who don't know which version of the app to use.

Same probleme here.

I also started seeing this issue today. Looks like this is a problem on Apple's side.