It supposedly even applies to Moto G5, codename cedric.

https://forums.lenovo.com/topic/findpost/1734/5234690/6297769

Yet another example, Moto Z2 Force, still officially supported by Lineage. (!)

The bottom of forum page adds to the irony.

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/MOTOROLA-Android-Developer-Community/Can-t-generate-Unique-Unlock-Key-Moto-Z2-Force/m-p/5232069

I ain't reading that, it's GizChina in 2024. But...

But since I have the means to answer the headline question myself, which is How to take good photos with phone?, let me tell you of something universal, from the point of a person who had relatively more technical experience than the artistic one and who in turn had an opportunity to learn of the artistic aspect from the opposite direction. The targeted reader for the following 10-part guide is a nerd who never digged into cameras, and I know plenty. :)

Let's start from the obvious...

1. Rule of thirds.
"Rules" in photography should never limit you. If something tells you that you should break them, go ahead, it might be for the better. But, generally speaking, yes, there is a merit to that one. If you think that the framing of your photos looks boring, rule of thirds may easily happen to fix it.

2. Keeping your worse angles a secret.
People always want to see something new and their time is limited. If you want them to be impressed, don't bore them by forcing them to pick one photo from the burst. It's your own job. Many of the one of a kind photos were selected between a few, taken moments before or after. A whole burst won't be the magazine cover.

3. RAW format.
As long as you have enough storage, you get to revisit the tuning that you've done long time ago. If you don't, you're still getting an option to basically take a photo the second time, and not just that. With proper embedded calibration in DNG, it's easy to obtain an obviously cleaner output than OEM defaults.

4. ETTR, aka exposure to the right.
Just like "unused RAM is wasted RAM", unused highlights are a waste of sensor's ADC. The darker your single frame capture, the more it gets buried in noise, which in default mode of a phone CMOS sensor is concentrated in the bottom of dynamic range. The difference made by ETTR can be as major as jumping 5 years in sensor technology. If you ran out of exposure time, then increase your ISO, to the level just before you hit highlight clipping. In the end, you import a raw and move the expo down to get drastically less noise.

5. Hardware choice.
You probably already have the phone that you wanted to buy, but if you don't and want to prioritize camera this time, then be aware that taking an interesting shot with high quality telephoto lets you easily declutter everything except the subject in question, often matching or exceeding your imagination of the scene. On the other hand, a high Bayer resolution, whether on actual Bayer or after binning, will let you minimize color artifacts and moire on granular details. But don't be misled by the full resolution of multiplied color filter arrays like Quad Bayer, Nona Bayer and anything further – a single frame from 200 MP 4x4 CFA won't look as good as the same from 108 MP 2x2 CFA sensor.

6. Proper camera app.
If your stock camera doesn't let you get rid of sharpening and major denoising and on top of that there's something wrong with the raws it produces, or it makes it too cumbersome to capture them, you gotta switch.

7. Gcam mods. Yes, even on a Pixel.
It's a major, or even an endless topic, but modded Google Camera remains valuable to this day, even the ancient builds on very modern hardware. As Google wanted their IP to be usable across various Pixel devices, the first successful mod for third party devices created a cascade, in result making it tunable to extreme levels. Of course, not all mods are equal, but the one I'm using already adds a lot of value, even while one that would fit me better must exist. If you dig into this rabbit hole, you may go really far with photo improvement.

8. Darker photos often look better.
Yes, you should ETTR, but ETTR is your input, not your output. By lowering exposure in post, it's easier to show the real contrast, without dynamic range compression.

9. No root, no fun.
Even while your device happens to be quite obscure and there's no one to mod any camera binaries or source, a way to set flags to allow extra access to third party apps or force a useful sensor mode system-wide tends to exist. In current reality, this tends to be mandatory to access in-sensor zoom. On sufficiently blessed devices, the feature set of stock camera will feel like a demo.

10. Camera isn't everything, even while you prioritize it.
In the end, we're about smartphones. What's the use of a phone that you can't hold comfortably, that gets its lens cover constantly smudged with fingers due to its position, what if you sacrificed everything for the sake of camera? You'll be less willing to take it out of pocket, as the similar roadblocks that prevent you from keeping a big, real cam on yourself will now also affect your phone. Perhaps it'll make these shots count? Not me to judge. :)

Experience is mine, the photos from Unsplash.com, mirrored in full resolution at this channel.


I reserve the right to expand on each topic at random intervals. ☺️

Let's expand on this one a bit:
A typical way to figure out the sensor modes configured by your OEM in the sensor driver is to utilize dumpsys media.camera, which is a command for root-less shell, hence we're keeping a few exotic device camera dumps at @cam2caps despite their not-so-rootable state.

On a qcom phone, you get to CTRL+F for the sensormodetable and count each x×y×fps combination from 0, where 0 is most of the time a mode with highest resolution.
On an mtk phone, the sensor drivers are in kernel space, meaning you can actually look at them. It's quite easy to figure out their structure, so let's go for actual forcing.

For qcom:
setprop vendor.debug.camera.overrideForceSensorMode YOURMODEID
For mtk:
setprop vendor.debug.cameng.force_sensormode YOURMODEID

Then narrow down the parts of camera stack that you may want to kill, by ps -A |grep cam, proceed to kill them with killall -9.

Of course, if you mismatch the raw resolution selected by the app and your sensor mode, things may break, but that doesn't make these modes useless, you can still go for a good JPEG. On a modern device, your chance to access an in-sensor zoom mode with same exact resolution as default is really high, and they really tend to work just fine. And heck, that's the minimum, many devices will offer a bit more.

So... Apple pokes holes in anti-fingerprinting measures by design, as a feature.
https://www.finnvoorhees.com/words/banned-iphone

The original Nougat wallpaper had stars, see you later.

It's quite different from the most recognizable version.

The starry one is at:
https://github.com/aosp-mirror/platform_frameworks_base/blob/d9f91827a9c6b0537b18d6e29873ae70b2d0bba6/core/res/res/drawable-sw720dp-nodpi/default_wallpaper.png?raw=true

Removal commit:
https://github.com/aosp-mirror/platform_frameworks_base/commit/38fdd605c83addeb9d52e1ab01958dbf7ee5742b