My Nexus 4 started to have an issue where using the camera may crash the phone... but only in third-party apps, never in the native camera app. I can't find the

My Nexus 4 started to have an issue where using the camera may crash the phone... but only in third-party apps, never in the native camera app. I can't find the link to the bug report right now, but the last I checked Google didn't acknowledge the bug despite dozens or hundreds of reports. Most irritating that this apparently started with a certain update (4.2.2?), and that the problem seems to be in the closed-source blobs, so you can't fix it yourself (I haven't checked, but that's what I read). The Nexus 4 has another stupid defect, it has no USB OTG support, that is the ability to use it as a USB host and plug in USB devices. If you look at the kernel source, Google actually removed support just before shipping. The stated reason was that since the USB port doubles as HDMI (Slimport), you can't get 5V out of it. I managed to patch the kernel, and if you use a Y cable (taking 5V from somewhere else), it indeed works. But the interesting thing is, the way it is wired you can actually get 5V out of the slimport itself, IIRC. You just have to set a bit in the kernel. I managed to get it halfway running, but I stopped working on it because I didn't have enough experience and time to give it a polished interface. I was also afraid that I was violating the USB spec and might fry my phone or a USB device :-). In the end I decided that it was just not worth it and I wanted to spend my spare time on other things in my life. But it makes you wonder, were there really technical reasons, or was it either 1) "stop trying to make that work, we got to get the Nexus 5 out next year!" or 2) "stop trying to make that work, we'd like to sell phones with larger memory (that people won't buy if they can just plug in a pen drive) / our partners would like to sell phones with larger memory / a evil cabal decided that it should be hard to put pirated .mp3 and .mkv on a phone, so we must make it as cumbersome as possible to get files onto there (MTP anybody?)" Not saying that's what happened, but Googles behavior (intransparency and quickly obsoleting even there flagship devices) erodes trust, and Google was one of the last companies you could have trusted a bit.