15 ms·

Seems like a problem with your camera hardware and/or software. An unprivileged, user-space app should not be able to soft-brick a hardware part.

• umvi 7y ago
  My phone is a Nexus 5X. All I know is that the old Snapchat app would occasionally soft-brick my camera such that no other application (including the camera app) could use it until I rebooted my phone. I confirmed with multiple experiments that Snapchat was the culprit. After the redesign, the problem went away.
  • srbby 7y ago
    I remember the same problem in a Nexus 4. And Google said they couldn't fix it because it was a bug in a Qualcomm driver and they had no access to the source code. I think the redesign fixed that because Snapchat no longer takes pictures with the camera. Instead, they take screenshots of the camera preview.
    • werber 7y ago
      Is that true across the board or just on Android?
      • srbby 7y ago
        If such a problem arose on iOS, Apple would patch it. Android manufacturers don't usually have that option, as they sometimes don't even have the code to the drivers.
  • abawany 7y ago
    I recall that in Android if an app doesn't release control of the camera then no other app can access it until the phone is rebooted. I suspect this is what was happening here. AFAIK, it isn't a bug with the phone hardware etc. just poor os design. Hopefully they'll fix it one day. Ref: 'Release the Camera - After using the camera, your application must properly release it for use by other applications.'