Open Camera causes battery drain?

(FP3 with pre installed /e/, last official update.)

Today I opened the camera app (Open Camera) and left it open. Didn’t think about it. I put my device into my pocket. Half an hour later I took it out and I was very surprized: it was unbelievable hot and more than 20% of my battery charge had gone. I know this because it was freshly charged to 100% just before.

Another app has not been running, so it was the camera.

Especially the temperature was astonishing. Never had a mobile which has been so hot. Seems that the CPU had a lot to do over a long time, but what?

Anyone else had this issue?

I was on many whole day mountain hikes with my previous phone. Normally I had the camera opened for the whole day, this has never been a problem. Must rethink this now.

Yes, I know this issue on my xiaomi devices. The device are waking up from time to time (I don’t knoe why). Normally it will go to sleep after a minute (normal timeout time). But when camera was last app which was open, the screen don’t turn off, because the camera app doesn’t allow ‘sleep’ modus. In pocket the focus is working all the time and the screen is on full brightness. That’s why the device us getting so hot.
Because I don’t know what app is waking up the device I’m always close the camera app after useing it.

Hi I am using gcam, not open camera. Just tried, my phone is going to sleep after five minutes with camera app open.
You may be able to allow sleep mode while camera app is open under settings - system - advanced - developer options (you may need to activate developer options first) - work memory - started apps at boot. Select camera app and disable deactivate sleep mode.
Maybe there is an easier way to access these settings.

But I want have this ‘no sleep mode’ for camera app :wink:

Yesterday I was on my first hiking tour with the new mobile. Took some pictures. When I came home my device was off. Couldn’t explain that. I swear I switched off the camera app always explicitly. But at the end of the day I had only 4% accu power and the device switched off himself :frowning:

And when you look at Settings > Battery for more details about what apps are using battery, what do you see ?

The first thing I did was to plug in the device for charging. Since I did this I can’t see anymore where the most of the accu power was lost (yes, would indeed be interesting!)

But because this was the first time I really used the camera for more than just a few tests and the power consumption of the device was completely in order for the four weeks since I have it I still guess it was the camera. The camera (and it’s software) seems to be a dangerous thing. At the moment the user has seriously to pay attention on what happens.

Look, when the camera tries to focus something, on and on and on, why does this happen endlessly? That’s half-baked. If an auto focus can’t be achieved after 30s then you can stop this, it will not be achieved anymore, especially in the complete darkness of my pocket. And why must the camera app let the screen always on? OK, this can be useful when you take a picture. But after two minutes it’s senseless. The remaining energy in the accu is much more valuable than this luxury because you will also not take a single further picture when your accu is down.

You can disable this in Camera > the setting symbol > On screen GUI… > Keep display on.

If you want to disable the automatic maximum brightness, it’s the setting just below.

You can also disable the automatic focus. Open Camera, click on the 3dots at the top of the screen, and select the lock symbol (under flash settings). Now you have to click on the screen to focus.

It seems to be the screen. When I switch off the option to let the screen on the screen gets indeed dark after the typical timespan. When I let it this way (with the camera open) it seems not to drain the battery at all. The device does also not heat up anymore.

The auto focus seems not to be a significant part of the problem. I tried also to switch it off by choosing one of the several manual focus methods, but this didn’t show any effect on the battery. I also can’t detect an impact on CPU load.

BTW: it seems that a manual focus is much more difficult to use than just to rely on the auto focus, especially when you don’t use a stand. I got not many good pictures using a manual focus, even when I tried very carefully to focus something. Especially on near distances (under 1m) the continuous auto focus is much better. So I will not switch it off generally.