Google makes a change in Android 11 that forces apps that want to take photos or video to use the phone’s built-in camera app – even if you’ve created another camera app, such as OpenCamera, your default choice for photos.
“[W]e believe it is the right trade-off to protect the privacy and security of our users, ”the Android engineering team wrote on August 17, adding that apps that call the camera should explicitly exclude any third-party camera app appoint wants to support. Now, Google gives us the reason: it is to keep bad actors from potentially harassing your location.
It is not a drastic change; many camera features will still work exactly as they once did. It also reflects the way the camera works on the iPhone. This year alone, Apple allowed third-party alternative app standards – if only for email and browser apps.
And yet, two of the most popular developers of the camera apps tell third parties The edge that Google’s move seems like a disgrace. One fears it could affect its business by turning third-party camera apps into second-class citizens.
To understand what is changing, it would probably help if I first explain what remains the same:
- You can still open and use a third-party camera app directly by tapping the icon on your home screen
- You can still take pictures with the cameras built in popular apps like Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram
- You will still be able to double-click your power button (or similar keyboard shortcuts) to launch the camera app of your choice, Google confirms
- Apps will also still be able to launch the camera app of your choice; they just can’t import photos or videos that way
The only thing that changes: if Android apps want to use your camera app – instead of baking in a camera app of their own – they will now go directly to your phone’s built-in camera app instead of you choose.
That’s an important distinction, because it means apps can’t phone with your location at home. Google has updated its guidance to developers to explain what this is really about: the company is raising concerns about apps that can request photos, so they can track your location quietly. When you take a photo, it is sometimes geo-tagged with the GPS coordinates where you took that photo, and an app that was not for camera could set that by saving on a camera app, even if you never had that location permission for the original app.
It’s one thing: Shutterfly was accused of reaping GPS coordinates from EXIF metadata back in 2019, and other apps have tried various tactics to get around Android’s access system.
Originally, the new behavior surprised the author of Android programming books Mark Murphy so much that he submitted it as a bug, only for Android engineers to confirm that it was ‘intended behavior’.
And prior to Google’s fuller statement, I asked some of the biggest third-party app developers how they feel about the move. When the developer of the 10M + download Camera FV-5 reminded me, it’s just the latest battle of third-party apps nowadays, because OEMs like Samsung rarely allow alternative apps to access you complementary new lens of your phone as the fancier features they have built.
The move “will definitely affect our app, and all third-party apps, as it will reduce their visibility and add unnecessary friction for the user who wants to use a third-party app like ours,” said Camera FV -5 developer Flavio Gonzalez. He added that Google’s solution “does not make sense”, as it is unlikely that most app developers will care enough to build specifically in support of a wide range of third-party camera apps like his.
On the other hand, Footej Camera co-founder Stratos Karafotis does not think the restriction is a big deal. While agreeing to the Google solution “makes no sense”, he said users “can still use their favorite camera app” and expects them to get used to the change.
Meanwhile, OpenCamera founder Mark Harman, another developer with 10M + downloads, mostly just hopes that users will choose their camera app directly from the Android home screen instead of relying on the intent of another app. “[T]its unfortunately limited to third-party camera apps, and means they can not completely replace the built-in camera app, “he acknowledged, saying that” it seems to me a shame to take away people’s choice here. “But he did not worry earlier this week.
However, I’m a little envious of whether Google had to go that far anyway. Why not hit on bad camera apps that share EXIF metadata instead of distrusting them all by default? Or create an API that strips EXIF data, perhaps? Why should Samsung, Google, and theoretically trust the camera apps Huawei and Xiaomi more than the little guys in the Play Store? It made me wonder if there are other security or competition risks that Google can hedge against, but the company tells me that this move is specifically about protecting EXIF location metadata from abuse.
On the plus side, Google has taken another initiative to bring desirable features like Night Mode to more camera apps in the future, with OEMs like Samsung, LG, Oppo, Xiaomi, and Motorola at least partly on board. It’s called CameraX, and perhaps it will make third-party apps feel more like first-party apps in the future. We will have to see if Android phone makers are ready to lend their most interesting camera capabilities.
