nobitakun It is so annoying every time people is telling me it's hardware problem because I know it is not.
- Actually, a very specific suggestion was made for an experiment that would shed light on the hardware/software issue (de0u). That suggestion may not be attractive, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't made or wasn't relevant.
- Here is a bug report from Google's Android bug tracker for
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: No available camera can be found: #167201193. Their diagnosis is "something stuck in the Camera HAL or camera service", which would definitely include the camera hardware itself being stuck.
Since all 6a devices running GrapheneOS are running the same HAL and service software, if only a very small number of those devices have this problem, that genuinely does suggest the hardware. The fact that the hardware works fine sometimes does not mean the hardware is fully functional, because operating/failing intermittently is common for failing hardware.
Or maybe somehow there is a software problem (it's not impossible). Here are steps that could be taken:
- Turn the device all the way off (via "Power off", not via rebooting), let it sit for 10 minutes. If that doesn't work,
- Reset cache & storage for any/all camera apps on the phone. If that doesn't work,
- Flash the device back to Google's OS. If the camera works fine across 10 reboots of Google's OS,
- Flash back to GrapheneOS. If the problem comes back right away, file an issue on the appropriate GrapheneOS issue tracker.
- If the problem does not come back right away, but does eventually return, then file an issue and/or go back to #1.
If powering the device off for 10 minutes works reliably, then the camera is glitchy, even if it works sometimes. If the camera misbehaves on Google's OS, then Google will need to solve the problem (which, given the age of the 6a, seems very unlikely).
Overall, based on the description so far, my estimate of likelihood of glitchy hardware is at least 90%. The fact that zero users reported the same symptoms as the ones in the original post for eight months, then again for three months, indicates that whatever is going on is extremely rare.