Writing a camera app is far more complicated than designing a simple calendar widget based on template. Especially when the regular users are the judges, making the camera department stronger is the foremost duty of the Android OEMs. Google is doing it in a pretty cool way.
The Mountain View giant is offloading the post-processing task to a dedicated processing unit (dubbed as Pixel Visual Core). Their camera app aka Google Camera, on the other hand, comes with varieties of secret sauces to enhance the final output.
Well, everybody is aware of the capabilities of the Google Camera app. The monumental popularity of the so-called ‘GCam ports’ indicates the power of a highly efficient codebase. Luckily, Google has a thing called ‘CameraX’ for the phone makers to achieve a similar level of proficiency without breaking a sweat.
CameraX is a Jetpack support library, built to help you make camera app development easier. It provides a consistent and easy-to-use API surface that works across most Android devices, with backward-compatibility to Android 5.0 (API level 21).
CameraX enables developers to leverage the same camera experiences and features that preinstalled camera apps provide, with as little as two lines of code. CameraX Extensions are optional add-ons that enable you to add effects like Portrait, HDR, Night, and Beauty within your application on supported devices.
(Source)
At this moment, only a handful of non-Google phones support CameraX functionalities. But the situation is soon going to be changed.
- Huawei (HDR, Portrait): Mate 20 series, P30 series, Honor Magic 2, Honor View 20
- Samsung (HDR, Night, Beauty, Auto): Galaxy Note 10 series
Alen Wu, the VP of OPPO, recently announced that the Chinese OEM is incorporating CameraX in some of their phones. As the library is completely dependent on the availability of the Camera2 API, phones running updated version of ColorOS should have the API available out of the box.
I won’t say that the upcoming OPPO phones will feature Pixel-esque camera quality, but the company already impressed the critics with the camera performance of the OPPO Reno series. Interestingly, Realme phones also run OPPO’s ColorOS, so they should get the enhancement too!
We know Realme is cooking a lot of things, and boosting their camera performance is also in the pipeline. The assurance came from none other than Chandler, the camera testing engineer of Realme.
The conversation is originated from the official Realme Camera feedback group, thus the information is pretty legitimate. We still don’t know any ETA, but guess it will be the part of the forthcoming Realme OS.
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ColorOS
Kingshuk De
896 Posts
I came from a mixed background of Statistics and Computer Science. My research domains included embedded computer systems, mobile computing and delay tolerant networks in post-disaster scenarios. Apart from tinkering with gadgets or building hackintosh, I like to hop on various subreddits and forums like MyDigitalLife and XDA.
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