If you are an Apple user, you may have noticed some blurry photos and videos from Android devices. leading people to assume the camera quality on those phones is bad. But this isn’t necessarily the case and I’ll explain why right now.
So the biggest culprit of poor image quality on Android isn’t the camera lens itself, but an app called Snapchat, when it was first released in 2011, it was only available on iPhone. Once Snapchat’s popularity skyrocketed, they rushed to create a version of the app for an Android.
But it proved to be inferior to the iPhones, mainly due to the complexity of Android’s ecosystem; it’s always been fragmented with hundreds of different phones running various versions of the Android operating system. That makes it difficult for developers like Snapchat to ensure their app functions properly on every single Android device.
So when Snapchat was released for Android in 2012, it had a lot of issues, like constant lagging, crashing and freezing. When you could get the app to work, the photos it took were very bad quality.
By the end of 2014, 40% of adults in the US were exchanging photos using Snapchat, which propagated the assumption that Androids had bad cameras, even though it was Snapchat’s faulty app causing the problems.
Now an update to Snapchat on Android was released in 2019, fixing mini of the reliability issues and improving photo quality. So now the only likely cause of bad photos on Android is the device’s camera system. And its quality can vary with the model. For example the Motorola Moto E is $150, and takes photos that are quite blurry in low-quality but the Galaxy S21 Ultra, which retails for $1,200 has a fantastic camera system that would never be mistaken as low quality. but consider Apple, the lowest-cost phone they’ve ever released, the iPhone SE is $400. since the company doesn’t compete at the ultra low end of the market. Therefore preventing their platform being associated with cheap, low-quality cameras.
This article is inspired by a video in Apple Explained YouTube channel.
