FaceTime on Big Sur is Horribly Broken

[TigerMSTR]

Some of the bugs I've encountered using FaceTime on the Mac:

1. When an incoming call is received, the Mac will play the FaceTime ringtone, but no notification or dialogue box will pop up allowing me to accept the call.
2. When I have my webcam on, my friend sees nothing but a black screen.
3. When disabling my webcam, the green light remains active on my MacBook
4. FaceTime calls only reliably connect when calling other Macs. The call will fail if the person on the other end is using an iPhone.
5. The microphone volume is very low when using FaceTime on the Mac with AirPods. This only happens with FaceTime.
6. The Mac will just fail to accept incoming calls

I've been able to replicate all of these bugs on two M1 MacBook Airs, so it's not isolated to just my system. Not sure if these bugs exist in the Intel variants of FaceTime. The application is damn near unusable.

 

[piattj]

Never had any problem whatsoever with FaceTime on my Big Sur MacBook Air.

 

[mj_]

I cannot confirm any of these. I use FaceTime on my M1 Air all the time and haven't encountered any issue so far. Maybe something in your specific user profile is messed up, did you restore both M1 Airs from the same backup?

 

[Honza1]

No problems here, my daughter has M1 Air and FaceTime seems one of primary applications. I would hear immediately about these issues - I am her IT support... no complaints. If anything, all feedback I am getting is "best computer I ever had", everything works all the time. It is school/after school computer (= not gaming). Based on my long experience, I consider this to be torture test for the M1 Air.
She does not have AirPods, so I cannot say anything to that issue.

While this may not seem like helpful info for you, it suggests that there is something specific to your setup or devices which causes these issues. Something which is not common for others.
For example, did you disable somehow notifications for FaceTime?
Also, how do you disable the camera? As far as I know it cannot be done in system, at least i do not see any option for that. Do you use some software to do so? Could that be interfering?

 

[TheGeneralist]

Confirm there are definitely issues on M1 Machines. On my M1 MBP, making and receiving calls via iPhone is very buggy. This has never been rock stable on Big Sur / M1, but has become much worse with the last dot releases - currently making calls fails most of the time while receiving calls is completely INOP.

 

[TigerMSTR]

I cannot confirm any of these. I use FaceTime on my M1 Air all the time and haven't encountered any issue so far. Maybe something in your specific user profile is messed up, did you restore both M1 Airs from the same backup?

Definitely not related to my Apple ID unfortunately. My friend's M1 MacBook Air has the exact same symptoms as mine.

 

[dbyrne]

I was having the same problem on my M1 MacBook Air on Big Sur and found this thread. I discovered that I had somehow set Do Not Disturb to Always On. I have no recollection of turning that on, but once I did, FaceTime calls went back to behaving normally, including handoff between my iPhone and Mac. YMMV.

 

[cfm56d7b]

I can report another Facetime problem after upgrading to Big Sur 11.6.1. Facetime is configured to initiate / accept calls from the iPhone. At some point, Activity Monitor reports that Facetime is using 85 Gb of memory (most of it swapped to hard disk) and other applications are reporting out of memory errors. So Facetime seemingly has a memory leak. Terminating Facetime solves the problem.