Google Camera is the holy grail in the world of third party camera apps on the Play Store. While, other smartphone companies depend on good camera hardware for better quality image production, whereas Google’s image processing algorithms do an exceptionally good job to give the best output. It was launched in April 2016, for all Android devices running Kitkat or higher. But lately, Google has limited the app to only Pixel devices. Although, there is an unofficial way to get the GCam app for other phones, but it comes with its problems.
GCam was initially developed for the image fusion technology in Google Glass by a team led by Marc Levoy. On Pixel devices, the app uses hardware accelerators for image processing. It has some great features which help the user to get perfect output. Some of these feature are:-
Portrait Mode – Portrait mode is common these days on smartphones. But with Google’s amazing image processing, the results from the Google Camera app are outstanding. In portrait mode, the subject in front of the camera remains in focus while the background gets blurred slightly, creating a bokeh effect.
Google Lens – This is a very useful feature for people who travel and in general too. It allows you to transalate text which is on your camera, identify plant and animals, scan barcodes, identify products and books. etc.
Some developers use ‘ports’ to make the GCam app available for other smartphones. These ports do not always function as fluidly as the official app or some features in the GCam may not work. This is because of incompatibility of the camera hardware with the GCam app.
The latest Gcam Port aka 8.1 by Urnyx05 is running smoothly on most of the devices. However, the newer version of Gcam Port is incompatible with Samsung and OnePlus phones. Developer Urnyx05 has also mentioned about this bug in the official changelog of 8.1 Gcam Port. Have a look at it down below.
The app is crashing repeatedly, making it unusable. An update to the ports is expected to fix these issues, but right now, a timeline to the update cannot be predicted.
