Droid Camera Fixes Itself for 24.5 Days
There have been widespread reports that the Droid’s camera is crap and that autofocus is broken. The autofocus started working today and many speculated that it was because Verizon pushed out a secret software update to fix the issue. It turns out the issue is the result of a bug in the autofocus routine where a 32-bit integer that stores milliseconds is overflowing to negative every 24.5 days (2^31 milliseconds is about 24.5 days).
According to the link:
There’s a rounding-error bug in the camera driver’s autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle. That is, it’ll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again.
The 17th is the start of a new “works correctly” cycle, so the devices will be fine for a while. A permanent fix is in the works.