Google Nexus 5 battery drain camera bug fix in the works

Google has confirmed that a flaw exists in the camera software on its Nexus 5 smartphone, and potentially other devices running a stock version of Android 4.4 KitKat, which causes the handset to get extremely warm and the battery to discharge - but says a fix is now in the works.Users have been reporting issues of overheating handsets and poor battery life to Google following the release of Android 4.4.2 KitKat, with the majority running the software on the company's flagship Nexus 5 handset. The company has confirmed the problem, suggesting it relates to the driver for the smartphone's cameras gobbling up more CPU time than it should and continuing to run in the background even when the camera application is not loaded.Although Google is holding its hand up to the bug itself, the company believes the more recent spike in reports from users is the result of a third-party change. "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," the company explained in a statement to users. "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."