Google has officially acknowledged the battery drain issue in Nexus 5 and has promised that a fix is in the works.
The company claims the issue is due to high CPU usage of the “mm-qcamera-daemon” process that leads to the battery draining sooner than expected.
“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,” wrote a Google project member on the Android Open Source Project forum.
The project member explained that the recent update to Skype seems to access the camera regularly from background triggering this bug, but made it clear that the company doesn’t “believe there’s a bug in Skype itself.”
“Uninstalling Skype may substantially reduce the likelihood of this bug appearing, but I realise Skype is a very important application for many people,” said the project member.
“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.”
The project member clearly noted that issues of high CPU usage on other handsets will need to be taken up with their manufacturers separately.
He stated that other devices using a Qualcomm chip might face issues but that “need not necessarily mean the N5 has the same problem and vice versa,” as each has differences in their software.
The project member, however, refused to provide a timeline for the release of the next maintenance update because of the testing involved and the other bug fixes they are working on.
There is a workaround through – a quick reboot of the smartphone should bring down the CPU usage and hence the battery drain.
