Android 11 Update Will Stop Apps From Using 3rd Party Camera Software: But Why?

As per the reports, Google is introducing a change in Android 11 which will force all the applications on your mobile phone to use built-in camera applications for images and videos instead of other third-party camera applications.

So, in some specific situations, users wouldn’t be able to select the default camera app.

Moving ahead, the search engine provider has confirmed the news and also explained the reason behind the use of its built-in camera app in its upcoming version of Android.

How Would This Affect?

The current version Android allows apps to display a pop-up camera picker to select the preferred camera app while taking the photographs.

But now with the latest change, this option will be removed in Android 11.

It means, that the popular camera apps like Adobe Lightroom, VSCO, and A Better Camera, will have to revert to their phone’s built-in camera software when taking photos or videos from within another app.

It is noteworthy here that users will still be able to use any camera app they wish, but they will have to launch it directly. 

Also, with the new change, only the camera picker option is affected.

Why Would This Happen?

While explaining the reason, On August 17, the Android engineering team said, it is the right trade-off to protect the security as well as the privacy of users. 

They further said that the applications that need to use a camera app will have to explicitly name each third-party camera application they would like to support. 

Also, the new restriction will help in preventing the apps from grabbing your location without permission. 

Even though an app has been denied access to your location data, there is a possibility of circumventing this restriction when using third-party camera apps.

According to the company, this change in Android 11 will keep bad actors from harvesting the location data of users.

As the main problem arises because of camera apps keeping the embed location data within their image files.

There’s no way to prevent this information from being returned to the calling app along with the photo hence the restrictions.

Basically, Google has considered this new change as a privacy measure. 

Imagine a scenario where a person has downloaded a malicious camera app unknowingly.

Here, the user might end up sharing their personal pictures while using such apps. 

Mostly, images are geotagged and a non-camera application might steal the data by piggybacking on a third-party camera application.

So, this change has a significance as it means that third-party camera applications can’t access your location data.

Users may feel frustrated to find such a convenient feature removed and hope that they could find a more elegant solution in the coming days.