Google have admitted that they know all about a flaw on the camera software of the Nexus 5 and some other handsets that have stock KitKat 4.4. The issue has seen the handsets get very warm and has caused the battery of the device to drain down. Google said that they are working to resolve the issue.
Owners of the handsets said that the battery of their handset has drained down fast following the update to KitKat 4.4 and Google said that it is down to the driver using all the CPU, even when the camera app is not being used, as it continues to run in the background.
Google did put their hands up and say that the issue was down to them. However at the same time they also said that the recent spike in the amount of people complaining was down to a 3rd party app change. 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.”
They pointed out that they were “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 the time being anyone with a handset that has been affected will have to wait until Google fix the issue as they didn’t give any date for doing so.
