Secure camera is really good. However I find google camera works better in low light with fast moving object, like in door photo of moving pet etc.
For my use case, I have to install GCAM on my main profile, since my wife like to use it; and I don’t want to go through the hassel of transferring photos between profile. But of course, I denied internet access and setup storage scope for GCAM.
But that left me wondering, am I just making my life harder by using secure camera as default? Since it seems that although secure camera is pretty good, it is not as optimized as GCAM. I already have GCAM on my phone, so I cannot think of any privacy benefit by not setting it as the default.
What do you think? do you use GCAM or secure camera, and why?
I’ve got the Tensor chip on mine so I want to leverage the stock Google Camera’s performance. I downloaded it directly from the Play Store, and it is the smoothest out of all the other options I’ve tried from F-Droid (Stock GOS camera app, Libre Camera and Open Camera). I use GCAM without network permission (I know I know, this doesn’t mean it can’t talk to Google Play Services), and then use Hail with Shizuku to “freeze” all the Google sandboxing stuff like Services, Playstore, Framework, etc.
Do you use Shizuku with ADB on boot? AFAIK graphene os don’t support root.
I also doubt graphene maintainer will ever recommend to use Shizuku, but it is your phone your choice.
No root, I keep my bootloader locked. The frozen apps stay frozen even if you turn off wireless debugging and disconnect Shizuku. It’s a bit annoying but I’m used to that long workflow. Other than that, as the Graphene maintainers recommend, I don’t keep Shizuku or wireless debugging running at all times.
It depends on the phone, but on my Pixel 5, Google camera is far far better. The only permission it has is access to my storage and camera.
You can also use storage scope! so it only can access files it created!
I have google camera with network permission revoked. Ive tried the stock Graphene one and OpenCamera and they just dont cut it for me.
Storage Scopes doesn’t seem to work for it for me.
Now I think about it, I can’t remember where I got the APK, but I havent updated it since…
another openCamera user.
when i need precision I switch to freeDcam
Google Camera. It had the best quality by far. But Now i’m going to try all the other camera apps mentioned here.
Btw: I think you can just disallow network access for the google camera. I’m no privacy expert but i think that should make it alright?
Theoretically, google camera can talk to play service, which can send telemetry through there. This is somewhat likely as play service do handle telemetry.
Another unlikely scenario is that it talks to another app’s proprietary play service library code. This means even if you don’t have play service installed as long ad there is any app that uses play service, like slack, outlook, teams, even signal; then google app can send/receive data through the internet without network premission. Although this is technically doable for google, it is highly unlikely that they will o this.
Thanks for explaining. I hope they consider this privilege escalation and don’t do it like that.
I’m not sure. I should be safe, there are no google services or proprietary cloud apps on my device. I use Nextcloud for that and Matrix to chat. (I have a banking app, though, and a few other proprietary apps with tracking libraries included. Never checked what kind of servers they talk to.)
I use Libre Camera. It’s OK. I suspect Google Camera is better but I don’t feel good about installing it.
