But ‘mm-qcamera-daemon’ glitch may affect other KitKat devices too
Google says it has fixes ready for reported high CPU usage connected to the Nexus 5’s camera, according to a post by a Googler on the company’s issue tracker. The bug can cause the phone’s CPU to become maxed out — resulting in battery drain — when using the camera, with “mm-qcamera-daemon” showing high battery consumption in Android’s power consumption display. As the bug is related to the process handling camera data, third-party apps may trigger the glitch as well. According to the update on the Android issue tracker, Skype in particular “seems to access the camera regularly from its background service in some way that triggers this bug,” though the poster says they don’t believe this is a bug in Skype itself.
The Google employee says the bug will be fixed in the next maintenance release of Android, but until then the only remedy is to reboot the phone. Uninstalling Skype may also fix instances where the app triggers the “mm-qcamera-daemon” in the background. Perhaps more worryingly, though, the bug can affect other KitKat devices using Qualcomm chips for camera processing, such as the Galaxy Note 3. For these devices, the Googler says owners will need to wait for the device manufacturer to issue their own patch.
Meanwhile Nexus 5 owners should expect the fix along with other improvements in the next update, most likely Android 4.4.3.
Source: Google Issue Tracker; via Reddit, Phandroid