Especially now that Pixels started shipping with hardware chipsets specifically designed to accelerate certain kinds of image processing, this is a feature that's quite important to me not to lose when changing systems.
I can't comment on your question about the graphene camera app.
I've tried the Graphene Camera app, but to be honest the UX is a bit janky, but I think the image quality is basically the same.
Relevant Link: https://grapheneos.org/usage#camera
> I've tried the Graphene Camera app, but to be honest the UX is a bit janky, but I think the image quality is basically the same.
It has HDR+ and Night mode. It's largely the same image quality. Pixel Camera has a lot more overall features and fancier HDR+ features. The UI in our app has gotten significantly better. Make sure you're using Latency mode to match what Pixel Camera does rather than Quality mode which purposely delays capturing until focus lock.
Aah okay that's what this toggle means, thats definitely better.
But my biggest gripes with the GrapheneOS camera app are:
1. The Zoom slider: You can't select the different lenses easily (I'd need to set the zoom slider to exactly 5x to get the zoom lens without digital zoom, which is not that easy) and there is no way to quickly reset it to 1x. I also think the position for this slider would be better at the bottom (where most other camera apps put it)
2. The brightness and zoom slider are rather hard to hit, I maybe have a bit too fat fingers for these? (The brightness slider also does not seem to work in night mode) I also can't see the zoom/brightness values while sliding and the Google Camera App allows for more smoother/finer control.
Same with the little arrow in the top left corner, it always takes like 3-5 hits to open the menu. Never had this issue in the Google Camera App.
3. I need to use the QR Code mode to scan qr codes. I did bind the Google Camera app to double click the power button so I can easily take pictures and scan QR Codes, without the need to tap anything else. But It's definitely a cool feature that the GrapheneOS camera can scan many more Code Types and also that the GrapheneOS Camera removes exif data by default
4. The mode slider at the bottom doesn't let me scroll further than one mode, this means I'd need to swipe thrice to get to the QR Code mode from the Video mode (or tap twice) because when in QR Code mode I can't see the Video mode and vice versa
5. I currently tested it out for writing this comment and my phone definitely got way warmer than when using the Google Camera App. And it used 5% Battery while being active for 7 minutes. EDIT: very weird it did now vanish from the Battery Usage list in the Settings, and in the App Info it also says it did not use any battery since the last full charge (It did before)
6. I think it does not support the Astrophotgraphy (Tripod) mode for the Night Mode.
These are all not huge issues and most people who just want to quickly take some pictures are probably not really bothered by this. But I use the Phone Camera very often (its even one of the reasons I went for the Pixel 8 Pro instead of the normal 8, to get the extra zoom lens) so these issues made me install the Google Camera App.
Don't get me wrong, I still think it is really cool that GrapheneOS can ship an Open Source camera app which achieves the same Image Quality with added features like the HDR+, QR and Night Mode, which is probably enough for most users, and I wouldn't want to trade GrapheneOS for any other OS (see my comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41238691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41241594 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39145200)
That's not what the zoom buttons do in Pixel Camera and it doesn't switch at exactly the telephoto magnification zoom value but rather adjusts when it switches based on the available light because the telephoto camera can't handle low light as well. We could add 1x for going back to 1x but you can already easily zoom out to the ultrawide and the telephoto is more complex than people realize. You can see it often doesn't actually switch at the minimum.
> 2. The brightness and zoom slider are rather hard to hit, I maybe have a bit too fat fingers for these? (The brightness slider also does not seem to work in night mode) I also can't see the zoom/brightness values while sliding and the Google Camera App allows for more smoother/finer control. > > Same with the little arrow in the top left corner, it always takes like 3-5 hits to open the menu. Never had this issue in the Google Camera App.
You can swipe down for settings and can swipe left/right between modes. The arrow is mostly to imply that you can swipe down. We do plan to change the overall layout and sliders/buttons a bit.
> 3. I need to use the QR Code mode to scan qr codes. I did bind the Google Camera app to double click the power button so I can easily take pictures and scan QR Codes, without the need to tap anything else. But It's definitely a cool feature that the GrapheneOS camera can scan many more Code Types and also that the GrapheneOS Camera removes exif data by default
You can open it via the standard Android QR scan quick setting if you use it a lot.
> 4. The mode slider at the bottom doesn't let me scroll further than one mode, this means I'd need to swipe thrice to get to the QR Code mode from the Video mode (or tap twice) because when in QR Code mode I can't see the Video mode and vice versa
We can consider adjusting changing modes.
> 5. I currently tested it out for writing this comment and my phone definitely got way warmer than when using the Google Camera App. And it used 5% Battery while being active for 7 minutes. EDIT: very weird it did now vanish from the Battery Usage list in the Settings, and in the App Info it also says it did not use any battery since the last full charge (It did before)
It shouldn't consume more power than Pixel Camera. Don't know why that would be the case. It does do things a fair bit differently. CameraX is improving which brings improvements to our app without us having to do much and we implemented some things ourselves like the parallelized image saving in the background.
> 6. I think it does not support the Astrophotgraphy (Tripod) mode for the Night Mode.
We'd need them to add this to the extension API.
Ooh TIL, thank you, I just tried it out, that's definitely a bit confusing. Would it work to just have 2/3 buttons that switch between the cameras? Or is this not possible (because you need to supply a zoom level)?
> You can swipe down for settings and can swipe left/right between modes.
That works definitely better!
> It shouldn't consume more power than Pixel Camera. Don't know why that would be the case.
Will keep an eye out on this, but after quickly testing the few things you mentioned in your comment my phone already got a bit warmer.
> We'd need them to add this to the extension API.
Ah okay, that's a bummer!
Our Camera app has hardware-accelerated HDR+ and Night mode on current Pixels. Pixel Camera can be used on GrapheneOS for the full feature set it provides. It has the same hardware acceleration on GrapheneOS unless you toggle it off via our toggle for giving a specific list of Google apps special access to the TPU, image processing accelerator, etc. as Pixels do. Other apps can use these features too but via more limited standard APIs.
The main thing you lose on GrapheneOS is that certain financial apps choose to ban using a non-Google-certified OS which we think is a violation of anti-competition laws/regulations and intend to pursue it as a legal and/or regulatory issue. It should be possible to run all Android apps from the Play Store on any OS maintaining a comparable security model, and Google shouldn't get to have veto power over this as they do now. The certification rules for OEMs forbid implementing some of the privacy/security features we provide so it's clearly an unacceptable system even if it was open to us to get certified. It'd also be ridiculous to have each release delayed by third party certification if that was required.
> Especially now that Pixels started shipping with hardware chipsets specifically designed to accelerate certain kinds of image processing, this is a feature that's quite important to me not to lose when changing systems.
The hardware accelerated image processing and general purpose neural net acceleration via the TPU fully works on GrapheneOS.
Certain fancy AI features can't be used via our optional sandboxed Google Play feature because it's a set of regular sandboxed apps and we didn't provide toggles for granting it privileged access for niche functionality. As a simple example, the wake via hotword feature in Google Assistant can't be used because that's not a capability available to regular apps with a normal permission. We could implement our own wake system or make a toggle for it, it's just not a priority.
Even with the OpenCamera app (which allows for manual focus control), I'm still getting the same quality of pictures on my GrapheneOS Pixel 7 Pro as with the stock OS and camera app.