Is that a Linux thing rather than being specific to Android ? V4L does a lot of camera stuff in userland.

Android doesn't really user V4L (at least not in most devices). Fact of the matter is that camera drivers are rather buggy on many devices and if you manage to crash the camera library or the kernel module, it'll most likely break other apps.

You can of course blame that on Android, but pretty much no operating system will recover a device when the driver itself is broken and refuses to reset the device properly :)

This is what happens when you choose “freedom” over stability.

(iOS is not necessarily what I mean by “stability”. Not anymore at least.)

I'm not sure Android is a shining example of freedom.

Compared to iOS? Yes it is.

yes, perhaps, and it can be made more so, but the parent post said essentially 'Android is an example of what happens when you choose freedom over stability', and I don't think Android is a good example of that. There's lots of 'different Androids' but most of the problems come down to manufacturers not quality-testing their software and the (perhaps inevitable) use of all of the proprietary bits in the mobile that third parties thus can't fix/optimise.