Google has said that they know about an issue with the software for the camera on the Nexus 5 along with other devices which run the stock version. The issue means that the owner’s handset gets warm and the battery drains down fast. At the moment Google are working on bringing a fix for the issue.
Owners have complained that the battery life is not as good after making the update to KitKat 4.4 and Google said that this was down to the fact that the camera driver continues to run in the background, even when the app isn’t open.
Google admitted this issue was due to them, but they also pointed out that the rise in people complaining about it was down to a 3rd party app that had made changes. Google 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 did say that they were looking into additional fixes and that they would get the issue resolved as soon as they could. They said that the high CPU usage was an intermittent problem and that they were continuing to test fixes.
They said they thought that they had fixes for the high CPU issues due to the mm-qcamera-daemon. This should be included in the next maintenance update. They also said “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.”
So at least you know that Google is doing something about the issue and it shouldn’t be long before they send out a fix.
