Android 15 Might Offer Video Stabilization For Third-Party Apps

If you are among the people who aren’t impressed by the camera app on their Android phone, there are several third-party options that you can opt for. These third-party camera apps often pack advanced, pro-level controls and filters that aren’t available on the stock camera app.

However, they usually lack some of the basic features offered on the stock camera app. To fix this OEM can package its features into an “extension” that third-party camera apps use. As of now, Android has five types of extensions, but the upcoming Android 15 update could add support for a sixth extension dubbed Eyes Free videography.

On the inside, every camera app, be it the OEM stock app or a third-party app, is developed on top of Android’s Camera2 API. The Camera2 Extensions API offers a method for camera apps to access extensions that OEMs have implemented on their phones.

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Android 15 Wants To Make Third-Party Camera Apps Better

With Android 14, the Camera2 Extensions API offered support for five different types of extensions:

• Auto: “adjusts the extension mode according to the current scene background”
• Bokeh: “sharpens the foreground subject and blurs the background”
• Face retouch: “touches up skin texture, under-eye tone, and more”
• HDR: “widens exposure range, resulting in more vivid photos”
• Night: “brightens photos in low-light situations”

It’s not necessary that all these five extensions will be available for devices of all brands. For instance, Samsung has used every extension for several of its devices, while Google has only implemented the Night extension on its recent Pixels. Furthermore, these five extensions can only be used during image captures and previews but not for video recordings.

The new Eyes Free videography Camera2 extension, in turn, could be Android’s first Camera2 extension that can come in handy for video capture. This sixth Camera2 extension “aims to lock and stabilize a given region or object of interest” according to its description in AOSP.

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Android 15 To Make A Level Playing Field

While the ISP and camera pipeline in most devices already support basic video stabilization, more advanced techniques will need a bit of support. Third-party developers creating camera apps that support different Android devices face difficulties in creating a universal implementation of features such as night mode, HDR, bokeh, etc, which is similar to the stock implementation.

That’s the reason Camera2 extensions API exists, to provide third-party camera apps access to the same night mode, boken, HDR, and other features seen on the stock camera app. Android 15 will extend the list of available extensions to include a new Eyes Free videography extension.