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Let's talk about our camera experience on custom ROMs Dec 2, 2016

Bradon H, Dec 2, 2016 :

Hey everyone,

There's been a lot of discussion surrounding the potential release of camera blobs for the OnePlus 3. We get it, as we'd also love to bring our native camera experience to third-party ROMs. Back in September, @Carl mentioned that our camera team was looking into potential solutions during a Reddit AMA. That was and still is true, and there have been ongoing internal discussions on this topic.

While we always strive to be as open, collaborative, and transparent as possible, the realities of business can make things complicated. Our camera team has spent a lot of time developing our software, and our custom camera technology has become a large asset for OnePlus. We have to protect that.

One potential solution here would be to release camera blobs, which would place our code in a black box of sorts. With this method, our custom camera software could be directly inserted into third-party ROMs without risking our IP. However, using this method, photo capturing and processing speeds would be slower than on OxygenOS.

So, that's the tradeoff, and the question we've been debating internally. If we provide camera blobs, the quality of photos/videos in third party ROMs could match that of OxygenOS, but the camera experience would be a bit slower. We're kind of obsessive about user experience, and we're not sure this is a tradeoff that makes sense. But, we'd like to know what you think. Would you be interested in camera blobs given these tradeoffs? Are there any alternative solutions that might make sense for you?