Google went ahead and gave confirmation that they know about a flaw with the camera software on the Nexus 5. This also applies to other devices that are running the stock version of KitKat 4.4. The issue means that owners of the handsets feel them getting warm and the battery drains down fast on the handset. Google have said that they are working to fix the issue.
Some owners of the handset did complain about the poor battery life after they made the update to KitKat 4.4. Google put this down to the driver using up CPU time as it continues to run in the background, even when the camera app isn’t being used.
Google admitted that the bug was caused by them but they did point out that the recent spike in reports could be down to people installing a 3rd party app that had changed. They said “There’s been a significant increase in the frequency of reported problems. These may be related to a recent update to Skype, which seems to access the camera regularly from its background service in some way that triggers this bug.”
Google continued by saying “Investigating this, we’ve identified a few additional fixes that we hope resolve this issue for good. However, since the high CPU usage is an intermittent problem, we’re continuing to test our fixes to verify the problems are gone.
We believe we have fixes for the current high CPU reports on N5 due to mm-qcamera-daemon, and they will be included in the next maintenance update,” the company added before warning that said update will apply to the Nexus 5 only. “I’d also like to note that instances of high CPU use of mm-qcamera-daemon on other devices besides the N5 need to be reported to their manufacturers – while those devices also use a Qualcomm chip for their camera processing (and thus have a mm-qcamera-daemon process), each has differences in their software and issues with them do not necessarily mean the N5 has the same problem, and vice versa.”
For now those suffering heating of their handset and poor battery life will have to wait for a fix to arrive, but Google hasn’t said when this will happen.
