I'll get back home in a few minutes and screen record it for you if you want to see just to confirm
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If they've finally shipped on the newer phones, that's incredibly good news for our camera app because the main complaint we've been getting is lack of multi-camera support on Samsung phones. Seems they must have shipped it in an update if it's working on them those now.
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Most of the features people want beyond this require CameraX to be expanded with new APIs: video frame rate, H.264, AVIF/RAW for images, manual exposure control beyond exposure compensation slider, manual focus, etc. Some things we can do via Camera2Interop which we did with EIS.
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I think we may be able to provide a fair bit of white balance control via Camera2Interop. It's only possible to do things which are set up when initializing the camera though. Can't currently use dynamic APIs like focus that aren't part of setting up camera use case in advance.
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Would you say with a lot of this stuff it's not really on app developers like Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok for having bad quality in their apps and it's a little bit on Google for providing half-assed or annoying APIs or OEMs not adding support
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Many phones don't have the Camera2 API so if you wanted to use Camera2, you still need a fallback Camera1 implementation. That's why most apps didn't bother using Camera2. That's mostly on SoC vendors and OEMs, but also on Google for not REQUIRING providing it in the CDD/CTS.
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There are also a massive amount of bugs with the Camera2 implementations across non-Pixel and devices (Samsung has a very good implementation on their newer devices though). That's another reason to use Camera1: Camera2 is often buggy overall and especially features like EIS.
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We've found that many vendors are cheating on CTS certification. They are clearly failing many CTS tests, especially in areas like camera. Many of the mandatory camera tests can't possibly be passing and yet somehow they have a certified device allowing them to ship Google Play.
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Our Secure Camera app is not using any obscure features. It's using most of the CameraX API and manually using EIS via Camera2Interop.
CameraX has to work around a ton of bugs across devices. We reported about a dozen of those to them and they've worked around most of those now.
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For EIS, we've found that a lot of older devices from Sony and a bunch of other vendors claim to support EIS but if you try to use it, it crashes the camera service inside the OS. To a user, this appears only as the camera app's video mode preview freezing when you switch to it.
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We decided to enable EIS by default when the device claims that it's supported with a toggle to turn it off. This means users on some devices get a bad experience. Most users blame our app for bugs in the Camera2 API and also for missing Camera2 and CameraX features too.
Our camera app has a global average of 4.7 stars on the Play Store but has unfortunately dropped to 4.5 almost entirely based on people running into Camera2 bugs and missing Camera2/CameraX features. For example, lack of extensions on Pixels, so people think we don't have that.
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Even users aware of CameraX extensions and us talking about them end up seeing that they aren't present and think that it's on us for not implementing it yet.
90% of non-5-star ratings for our camera app on the Play Store are bugs in OEM Camera2 support or missing OEM features.
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