Kudos to Samsung, but it might also be a bad omen for camera support in third-party apps
Third-party camera applications on Android are complicated. Google’s Camera2 API and the CameraX Jetpack support library exist in order to streamline support for your phone’s camera hardware inside third-party apps, but both require support from OEMs—which isn’t mandatory. You’d think Google’s own phones would support those standards and libraries, but it looks like that’s not something you can expect out of the company that develops and maintains the Android operating system. Instead, it looks like Samsung is beating Google at its own game.
As pointed out by developer Zachary Wander on Twitter, firing up a CameraX info app he made shows that all CameraX extensions, like bokeh and HDR, are unsupported on all the camera sensors in Google’s newly released Pixel 6a. We spoke to him and found that he went on to further test this on an older Pixel 4a, and it’s an identical story.
AP alum Max Weinbach points out on Twitter that while Google doesn’t seem to support these camera standards, Samsung’s doing a swell job at it. All features are shown as supported on Samsung’s cameras, in stark contrast to what can be observed on Google’s own phone or phones from other OEMs like the OnePlus 10 Pro.
We tried out the app by ourselves, and found that not even our Pixel 6 Pro, Google’s crème de la crème, is spared from this absurdity — it’s still a sea of unsupported extensions. Meanwhile, our Galaxy S22 Ultra is in formidable shape, supporting all extensions across its four rear camera sensors.
As a matter of fact, as Mishaal Rahman points out, Google’s own documentation shows that no Pixel phones properly support CameraX extensions. That Google itself is seemingly unwilling to put in the legwork to make sure the cameras in its phones are compliant with its own standards isn’t a great look, and it seems like a bad omen for third-party camera app support on Android as a whole. We’ve reached out to Google for comment and will update this post with any new information we receive.
