The space in the middle is dominated by a big battery in any smartphone I've seen. I suspect it would be less efficient to break that up.

I think I'd accidentally stick my thumb/finger in front of a central camera even more often than I already do with corner cameras!

> why not put the camera in the middle of the phone?

Because when you pick it up, your hand is covering up the middle of the phone. However the top quarter is unobstructed.

> And why do the cameras keep moving around?

Easy way to tell models apart.

That's not the market they're going after, even with all the ads and promotion. It's more an aspirational positioning than a hardcore one.

For instance Xiaomi is a lot more serious about the photo part (and they also sell a lot less as well, this model was only noticed in photography circles)

https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-14-ultra/

Packaging. A phone is absolutely stuffed with components, most of the market highly values thinness, so every mm^3 is jealously fought over. Putting the camera in the middle might mean making the phone bigger, having to shrink the battery, or putting antennas in less-than-ideal places. It's design trade-offs all the way down.

Another reason that comes to mind is the camera bump. If you put the camera in the middle then it’d kinda rest on that on a flat surface and wobble. With the camera in a corner it sits on the camera bump + the opposite corner which is a bit more stable and less obvious.

If we are playing with phone camera form factors, I vote for thinking outside the phone. Remove the camera entirely from the phone, and put it in a separate cylindrical device; a smaller incarnation of Apple's ancient iSight webcam. Stuff in better optics, put controls on the cylinder, and allow viewing the image from my watch when taking a photo/video. So I can leave the phone at home...

> why not put the camera in the middle of the phone?

This is one of those things that doesn't seem like it should matter, but it does. If the lens is mounted in the exact center of the body, the images come out looking unbalanced. To produce balanced images, you have to offset the lens. Even very expensive pro mirrorless bodies are offset; that is, if you look directly down the center of the lens, you'll notice there is more camera body sticking out on one side than the other.

This is called the chirality of the optical path and it is surprisingly difficult to predict analytically. Companies will typically design the optical path, prototype it, and mount it on a jig to precisely measure the chirality. From this, they design the body with the proper offset.

Chirality is more noticeable the smaller the sensor and the shorter the lens. So on smart phones, which put tiny sensors behind wide-angle lenses, they have to get the offset just right. This explains why the lenses are in slightly different places on the body every time Apple updates their cameras.