Google have confirmed that they know about a flaw with the camera software on the Nexus 5, along with other handsets that are running the stock version of KitKat 4.4. This flaw means that the device gets very warm and the battery drains down fast. They have said that they are working on a fix for the issue.
Owners of devices have complained about the battery life of their handsets being poor following the update to KitKat 4.4. Google have said that this is down to the driver for the phone using up CPU time and that is continues to run in the background despite the camera app not being loaded.
While Google have admitted to being the cause of the bug, they have said that the recent spike in the number of people complaining about the issue has been down to a 3rd party 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.”
Google went on to say “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.”
At the moment owners of the device will have to remain patient as there hasn’t been any indication as to when the update will arrive.
