Incumbent camera apps act as a moat, limiting the success of new and niche smartphones.
Why another camera app?
Camera quality is super important when choosing and using a phone - 71% of people said so in this poll. The sensor and SoC/ISP hardware is only part of the story.
Incumbent manufacturers maintain their own highly advanced camera apps - this acts as a moat, making it harder for smaller companies to compete on the smartphone market, because they have to build their own amazing camera app from scratch.
The lack of advanced open-source camera apps limits competition in the smartphone market, and makes it harder for new smartphone manufacturers to start up.
The
Project
The App
We're building an advanced camera app - all open-source, and we need your help.
The camera app will support all major camera modes, leverage the hardware optimisations of any phone it’s installed on, apply image post-processing, and in future even have the advanced AI features of phones like the Pixel.
This might sound far-fetched, but it’s possible.
The project license is still TBD, but will probably be released for free on the Play Store, but require phone manufacturers/retailers to license the app for ~$2/device if they want to pre-install/customise it. This money will go towards further development, and building a small phone.
Over time, we’ll have multiple device retailers funding full-time development of the app, and the economies of scale would mean the app would be better than the camera for any one phone company.
The Team
Project & Monetisation Lead: Joe Reeve
Design Lead: TBD
Engineering Lead: TBD
Product Lead: TBD
Quality Lead: TBD
Other Contributors: You?
How Is This Different from Other Open Source Cameras?
White-labelling
In order for other phone manufacturers to license and adopt this camera, we need it to be trivially label-able to feel native to their own devices. The existing open-source camera apps have very fixed UIs that often are un-familiar and frankly ugly.
Licensing
Most existing open-source cameras are very permissively licensed, meaning they’re not able to build up enough income to re-invest in more advanced features.
Design-led
This camera app needs to not only produce beautiful photos, but also look and feel beautiful to use. It should feel familiar to iPhone, Pixel, and Samsung users, while having its own unique flair.
Start from scratch, or fork?
We are open to forking, though sense licensing will be tricky with this route. Also, white labelling will be trickier to back-port.
The majority of open-source camera apps don’t really do anything particularly difficult, and can be relatively easily re-built. The key thing we will spend time on is the more advanced and difficult features that the Open Source apps don’t already have.
Join The Project
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