This app was mentioned in 4 comments, with an average of 1.00 upvote
HAH, well, you are right on many fronts here. All cameras shoot RAW, some will let you have the files before their compression. And yes, I should save in both jpg/raw, but this is not a normal thing for me to want to access my canon shots on my phone. I have just been in the habit of only RAW as I usually go straight to the pc with the camera and edit away. Why wast space with the jpgs? Anywho, The bootloop quote was not specifically referencing custom roms, there was more to the article, and it was just listing possibilities. Majority was as you said about custom roms etc...
please if you want to risk your phone, only do so in the name of science and practice all measures of safeguards prior. Back it up... do whatever you can think of to be able to recover, hell, put the whole thing on video just in case.... as if it is the case CAT needs to seriously up their game on taking care of this.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tssystems.rawdecoderfree&hl=en
please, only do so if you have a backup phone and can be without for a coupe weeks like I will be!
Anywho, I am getting the hardware fixed and they said they do the software complimentary while they do the hardware... which should be under warranty so I may get lucky here, but I will be sure to keep everyone updated on how this goes.
oh, and if you are wrong, Ill buy you the beer... you will need one! ;P
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tssystems.rawdecoderfree this one? RAW isn't an image format so much as a sensor dump, it's extremely uncommon that people actually need it (maybe for extreme grading, but the reason it's gnarly is because it needs further processing to become an image), so a low compression JPEG is probably a better option for the future.
I'd still suggest a coincidence, software installed from the play store can't brick a device, that sounds like a hardware fault that manifested whilst you were doing something new, which is why they've become linked in your mind.
Try to use this app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tssystems.rawdecoderfree&hl=en