[torben-friis]

One would hope that enough things stay similar between devices that replacing, say, the galaxy s25 paves the way for a far easier implementation of the s26, particularly now that the market is stagnating a bit.

And I’m not knowledgeable about this at all, but intuitively I’d expect apple stuff to be much more customized than the average android phone - they’re famous for vertical integration and owning the end to end process.

[pjmlp]

Phones aren't x86, each is own snowflake, and on Android the nature of being a managed userspace, means there is a certain freedom regarding which ARM designs that Samsung, Qualcomm, Mediatek, and whatever else is out there comes up with.

Then there is everything else that happens to be on the motherboard.

[mcny]

The camera is also surprisingly software dependent. Using the pixel camera vs using default configuration with an app called open camera, the difference is so clear. The camera is basically all software — the images are pure trash before processing.

[torben-friis]

>Using the pixel camera vs using default configuration with an app called open camera, the difference is so clear.

Is this hardware dependent though?

I ask because I’ve seen custom android mods that port the pixel camera, presumably if that works for other devices it’s a good sign that postprocessing can be decoupled from specific hardware.

[VGHN7XDuOXPAzol]

I, too, have noticed this. Would be curious if anyone has a more in-depth article to read about why the difference is so stark!

[fsflover]

puri.sm/posts/cameras-its-complicated/

[qingcharles]

Can you access the camera, though? I thought full access to the camera sensor was locked down only to awful Samsung apps?

[SchemaLoad]

It's been many years since I did android rom stuff but how it was back then was that yes you can access the camera, but you lose the proprietary image processing pipeline which exists just as software. So your photos come out looking much worse since phone cameras rely heavily on software to look good.

[MrDrMcCoy]

On the other hand, you can take DNG RAW images and do the software processing later, except exactly the way you want. I rather like that flexibility, myself.