Google has made it known that they are aware of an issue to do with the camera software of the Nexus 5 and some other devices that run on the KitKat 4.4 stock version. The bug means that the device gets warm and the battery drains down fast. Google put the issue down to the driver of the phone using all the CPU time and it continues running in the background even when the camera app isn’t being used.
While Google did say that this was the issue, they also said that reports of the incident getting worse are 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 then said “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.”
It isn’t know when the update will arrive so it is looking as though owners of the handsets will have to remain patient for a while yet.
