Been on GOS on my Pixel 9 Pro XL for about a year and use the default camera app (the GOS one, not the Pixel one).
I’m not a pro photographer and the photos I’ve taken lately look like they were captured on a low-res laptop webcam. I’m suddenly appreciating how easy it was to take decent photos on iPhone.
What camera app do you use? Or are you using a separate device? Any recommendations would be much appreciated.
I am using a fork of the Pixel Camera that adds in manual focus. The manual focus is extremely useful to me, but otherwise this particular fork is very buggy.
I also have the stock pixel camera app with network permission revoked for when i get too frustrated with the fork crashing on me. The autofocus on the stock pixel app is super finicky, but i can usually get at least one good photo after several tries.
I have also tried opencamera and the stock GOS app. Opencamera is pretty ok, but i find the sliders are physically too small on the screen for me to be as precise as i want to be. Stock GOS app feels like a hardware demo, not made for photography.
i am not impressed with the Pixel camera hardware-wise. I also think iPhones take pretty bad photos though. I have an iPhone 15 pro (from work) and a Pixel 7 pro (GOS, mine) and i take photos with both very often. GOS is the only reason i have a Pixel over something with a good camera. To me, the Pixel looks a little worse than the iPhone at 1x, then around 3-5x zoom the Pixel looks much better, and anything above that really depends on lighting (Pixel seems to do better in meh light, iPhone gets a better shot in bright good light)
I am using the Pixel Camera from Play Store with network privilege revoked. I feel like I am losing too much with the stock camera app.
Can’t it still (theoretically) communicate via play services (if you have them installed) or am I being overly paranoid?
Maybe? I thought the point of Google Play Services being a regular sandboxed app was to prevent such things.
My (limited) understanding is that the sandboxing stops it having root-like privileges to do whatever it wants, but any app that wants to actually use it still can (otherwise play services wouldn’t actually be able to do anything and apps that require it would still fail, right?)
Hmm. Maybe I’ll give it a go.
Is the default app actually the issue? I wouldn’t be surprised if the camera hardware of a Google Pixel is just that much worse.