[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.