🐛 Android: every <Camera> mount leaks its SurfaceView and camera output stream

Prerequisites

• I have read and followed every applicable step in the Nitro Modules Troubleshooting guide.
• I have read the VisionCamera Troubleshooting guide.
• I have searched existing issues and found nothing matching.
• I am on the latest version of react-native-vision-camera, or have a specific reason I cannot upgrade.

Reproduction

https://github.com/Gogn/react-native-vision-camera_issue-reproducing

Steps to reproduce

1. Clone the attached repository or create a bare React-Native project
2. Run the app
3. Watch logcat: adb logcat | grep -E "SurfaceView\[|BufferQueue has been abandoned|Camera3-OutputStream"
4. Optionally check a heap dump: adb shell am dumpheap com.vcpreviewleak /something/heap.hprof

What did you expect to happen?

Mounting and unmounting a screen with <Camera> should release the SurfaceView and its camera output stream. After some time, the number of live SurfaceView / PreviewView / HybridPreviewView instances should stay at the same amount regardless of how many times the component is mounted.

What actually happened?

Every mount leaks the preview's SurfaceView and creates a new camera output stream, nothing is released. After the surface is destroyed on unmount, the camera pipeline keeps trying to queue buffers into the abandoned BufferQueue.

With every new mount/unmount cycle:

• a new SurfaceView surface is created and the previous one is never released
• Those surfaces emitts BufferQueue has been abandoned errors after being destroyed
• a new camera3 output stream is created
• just one MainActivity throughout, so this is not an Activity leak

Affected platforms

Android (emulator)

Device(s) affected

Android 11 emulator, arm64-v8a

VisionCamera version

5.2.3

React Native version

0.86.3

React Native architecture

New Architecture (Fabric / bridgeless)

Features being used

• Preview
• Photo capture
• Video capture
• Frame Processors (worklets)
• Skia Frame Processors
• Code/Barcode Scanner
• Location metadata
• Multi-cam
• Depth data
• HDR / custom dynamic range
• Custom format / FPS / resolution

Relevant logs / stack trace

One cycle, showing the surface being destroyed and then still written to:

D SurfaceViewImpl: Surface destroyed.
D SurfaceViewImpl: Surface closed androidx.camera.core.SurfaceRequest@f6f2cf
E BufferQueueProducer: [1e02dbf SurfaceView[com.vcpreviewleak/com.vcpreviewleak.MainActivity]#431(BLAST Consumer)431](id:7f8e000001af,api:4,p:596,c:32654) queueBuffer: BufferQueue has been abandoned
E Surface  : queueBuffer: error queuing buffer, -19
D StreamStateObserver: Update Preview stream state to IDLE
I HybridPreviewViewSpec: PreviewView stopped!
E Camera3-OutputStream: returnBufferCheckedLocked: Stream 544: Error queueing buffer to native window: No such device (-19)
E Camera3-OutputStream: getBufferLockedCommon: Stream 544: Can't dequeue next output buffer: No such device (-19)
D CXCP    : Closing capture session for CaptureSessionState-432

Heap dump after 30 cycles (app heap only):

     31  com.margelo.nitro.camera.views.HybridPreviewView
     31  com.margelo.nitro.camera.hybrids.outputs.HybridPreviewOutput
     25  com.margelo.nitro.camera.hybrids.HybridCameraSession
     25  com.margelo.nitro.camera.hybrids.HybridCameraController
      9  com.margelo.nitro.camera.hybrids.inputs.HybridCameraDevice

Additional context

• Seems not a duplicate of #4095. That issue was fixed by nitro#1460 and the fix is working here.
• In our app the leaked SurfaceView sits inside a navigation screen, so it pins the react-native-screens and that screen whole view hierarchy. The leak becomes Java heap growth.

Submission

• The reproduction I linked is either (preferred) a PR against this repo that adds a failing harness test following the harness-tests README, or (fallback) a public repo that reproduces the bug on a fresh clone. I understand the issue will be closed without one.
• I pasted logs as text (not screenshots).
• I wrote this report in my own words. I did not paste AI-generated descriptions of the bug.

Start with the linked reproduction repository and run the app while observing the provided adb logcat filter. Use the heap-dump command and the harness-tests README in apps/simple-camera/tests to compare repeated Camera mount/unmount cycles. Done means old SurfaceView and camera output instances are released without BufferQueue or Camera3-OutputStream errors.