The built-in camera on your Android phone is now your true default camera from Android 11 onwards.
What you need to know
With , Google is imposing an additional limit on how camera apps may plug into the system. Specifically, it's limiting what camera apps other than the default built-in app would be able to do.
As reported by , Google is mandating that third-party app without their own camera functionality can only launch the default camera app to carry out either image or video capture. Before this, a user would be presented with a dialogue allowing them to choose from the camera apps installed on their device.
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Google says it's doing this for safety reasons, and on the consumer end, it's hard to see how this would be a huge deal for most people. If you change your default camera app to another one, you won't notice the change in most common scenarios like quickly shaping photos by double-clicking the power button and the like.
That said, there is one use case where this becomes troublesome. If a user were to set another app as the default camera app and then disable the built-in camera app, it would effectively break the system. You won't be able to capture images in apps without their own camera functionality until you re-enable it and use it side-by-side your preferred camera option. It's not ideal, but it's not terrible either.
What you need to know
- An Android 11 update will change how third-party camera apps work on Google's operating system.
- Users will no longer be able to use apps that aren't built-in to capture photos in third-party apps.
- Google says that this is done for security reasons.
With , Google is imposing an additional limit on how camera apps may plug into the system. Specifically, it's limiting what camera apps other than the default built-in app would be able to do.
As reported by , Google is mandating that third-party app without their own camera functionality can only launch the default camera app to carry out either image or video capture. Before this, a user would be presented with a dialogue allowing them to choose from the camera apps installed on their device.
:
Google says it's doing this for safety reasons, and on the consumer end, it's hard to see how this would be a huge deal for most people. If you change your default camera app to another one, you won't notice the change in most common scenarios like quickly shaping photos by double-clicking the power button and the like.
That said, there is one use case where this becomes troublesome. If a user were to set another app as the default camera app and then disable the built-in camera app, it would effectively break the system. You won't be able to capture images in apps without their own camera functionality until you re-enable it and use it side-by-side your preferred camera option. It's not ideal, but it's not terrible either.