14 DAY TRIAL // The latest smartphone in the Nexus family is a great device. Those who managed to grab one via Google Play made a great deal getting the Nexus 5.
However, even though the smartphone is more than decent when it comes to specs, there are still a few software issues that need to be fixed. One of the most annoying problems currently affecting Nexus 5 is related to the smartphone’s camera.
The so-called “mm-qcamera-daemon” process that remains in the phone’s memory will drain the Nexus 5 battery quite fast. Even keeping the smartphone in idle mode will result in a complete depletion of the battery in less than a day.
The main problem is the “mm-qcamera-daemon” process can’t be killed manually or using a third-party application. Even after doing a full factory reset, the issue still persists because “mm-qcamera-daemon” is an important part of the camera subsystem, so it needs to run in order for users to be able to take advantage of the Nexus 5’s camera.
As explained by Google, the main issue lies in the fact that “mm-qcamera-daemon” gets stuck most of the time in a state where it uses large amounts of CPU, which in return prevents camera use and drains the battery like crazy.
If you have been affected by this issue, you will immediately notice it, as the Nexus 5 will become very hot even in idle mode. Those who managed to disable “mm-qcamera-daemon” completely will not be able to use the camera anymore.
This is the bad news, but the good news is the issue only affects Nexus 5 smartphones, as other Android devices that have the same process called “mm-qcamera-daemon” are based on different source code, customized for that particular smartphone.
Non-Nexus devices do not seem to be affected by this issue on a large scale
Those who own the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Motorola Moto G, and have similar problems, should contact manufacturers directly, as the fix that Google is working on will not solve their issues as well.
AndroidPolice reports Google recently confirmed it’s been able to identify more solutions to the Nexus 5 camera code issue and that it hopes to resolve the rest of the 100% CPU usage cases very soon.
Here is what a Google official had to say about the “mm-qcamera-daemon” issue on the Nexus 5: “We've also added a watchdog which tries to clean things up if the daemon gets stuck like this, in case there are still unaddressed issues.
“I'm marking this bug as FutureRelease, which means we've put fixes in place in our internal builds, and the fixes will be included in the next major update for the Nexus 5.”
This means that we should expect a fix for the Nexus 5 camera problem to be delivered with Android L, Google’s next major OS release.