[umvi]

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.

[abawany]

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.'

[srbby]

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]

Is that true across the board or just on Android?

[srbby]

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.