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Google has acknowledged the battery drain issue in the Nexus 5 (our review) and is about to release a fix for it soon. The company claims the drain is due to high CPU usage of the ‘mm-qcamera-daemon’ process, which allows other apps to access the camera of the phone.
Once started, the process remains in the background, even if the app has been closed, thus consuming more power than it would otherwise. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code discussion is buzzing with complaints about the issue. “Issue 60058: mm-qcamera-daemon cpu usage” has quite a lot of posts from developers and users who have faced the battery drain and there are quite a few solutions too, though we cannot vouch for how well they will work on all devices.

Explaining the issue, AOSP member Eino-Ville Talvala said, “We believe we have fixes for the current high CPU reports on N5 (Nexus 5) due to mm-qcamera-daemon, and they will be included in the next maintenance update.”
While there’s no estimate for when the fix will arrive, Talvala said that until it arrives “rebooting the phone is the only way to stop the high CPU usage/lack of camera function once it starts.” He also touched upon the latest update for the Skype app, which seems to have exacerbated the issue. While Talvala says that Skype itself has no bug, the app seems to “access the camera regularly from its background service in some way that triggers this bug”

“Other camera-using applications may trigger this bug as well, but that’s been relatively rare. Most applications also do not access the camera when not in the foreground, so they will only trigger issues when actively used,” he added.

Some users were complaining of this issue even when using other phones that have Qualcomm processors. For this Talvala said, “Instances of high CPU use of mm-qcamera-daemon on other devices besides the N5 (Nexus 5) 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.”

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