I’m using the default Google Picture Gallery app. In Belgium its called Google Foto’s. Not using a third party Gallery app.
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Is this still happening? For those who do encounter it, can you reproduce it in safe mode? I take many pictures with my phone. I haven’t experience these issues, which makes be suspect it’s a 3rd party app issue that’s causing it. In that case FP support may not help us with that, but the 3rd party perhaps.
Hasn’t happen to me in the last month, but I disabled the camera permission for most apps and enable it only when I need it (as suggested by support). So it’s possible that some app was causing it. But as it was pretty random, I couldn’t ever reproduce it in safe mode. Sometimes it happened twice a day, sometimes after a week. I can’t run in safe mode for a week. 
But even if it’s caused by some 3rd party app, it shouldn’t be possible to completely cripple the camera driver like this. Every time this happened I tried to manually kill all apps with the camera permission. At that moment, the OS should free the camera for other apps or restart the driver. However, that’s not happening. It just remains stuck as if some app is using the camera.
I recently thought the launcher had a bug because the calendar didn’t open anymore when tapping the date. It turned out an app from work was poorly programmed to be an option to basically open any application, including a calendar. The popup to select which app to use was silent and thus nothing happened.
So it could be a 3rd party app is doing something to the environment that messes everything up. For now I’ll mark this issue in the #wiki as non-producible. If things change we can always revert that.
It happened to me again during holidays where I took a lot of pictures. It is still not reproducible for me, though. Sometimes it happened after only a few pictures, sometimes not for a week. Sometimes it was only the selfie cam that failed and would force-close the GCam app when I tried to switch to it.
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Maybe we need to update the title then? It may be a GCam issue, the title now suggests it’s a Fairphone camera issue.
It’s not just a GCam issue though. I would say it’s the camera driver problem. I once managed to crash it even while using Facebook Messenger.
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I agree, this doesn’t seem to be a GCam specific problem.
I haven’t been able to crash the GCam version I use the most, but I have had a frozen FP Camera on stock FPOS multiple times and the standard camera app on Calyx also turns black once in a while (should be using proprietary blobs as well).
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I think I managed to make it crash from Signal when trying to take a picture there if I remember correctly. It happens with GCam because I use that the most, my very first crash was still with the stock camera app as well.
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But could it be an issue triggered by having GCam installed? I haven’t seen a camera crash since February. I sometimes also use the Signal camera. It could be that I just don’t trigger the bug somehow, but it could also be that the GCam mods are the common factor for crashes. Are there people that experience this issue without having GCam installed? The exact same issue of course, not some other issue.
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I don’t think this has anything to do with GCam, I have only just installed GCam for the first time ever 2 weeks ago or so.
All the crashes I’ve witnessed happened either before that, or on the device of a family member that’s running stock FPOS and never had GCam (or any other camera app for that matter) installed.
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Thanks, that is interesting to know! I had started to suspect GCam as well by now, but that does not seem to be the case then. It could still be the case that it somehow triggers the problem more often for some reason, maybe. But I’d say the root cause is probably some sort of driver or hardware problem.
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It has not happened to me recently.
Mine crashed for the first time today as well cant really say why however when it happened nothing than a restart helped…seems my mail to support is getting longer every day🙃
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while typing my mail to support I was trying to remember what I actually did before this happened beside of trying to take pictures with stock cam app and GCam port. The only I think happened before that and was different to other occasions when I used the 2 apps in parralel is, that I had the proximity sensor again going crazy when I tried to listen to a WhatsAppp Voice message in sunlight and after that I noticed the ambient light adjusting too often and not adequate… so I’m wondering if the proximity sensor bug could somehow have influenced this, although I cant explain how?
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Just to record in case support stops by, it happened today again this time twice within one hour
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I have never installed Gcam and regularly get this issue. My torch never works and always says ‘camera in use’. I’m going to try restricting access to the camera to see if I can find the culprit app.
Hi and welcome to the community. This could be a slight different issue, I myself never saw a message as you described, for me its just a black screen irrespective of the app used
It’s the same issue. The black screen is the result of the camera being in use. See:
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Ah thanks did not notice the mention of the torch and never checked this when this happens, will check the next time it happens
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