Android has changed a lot of things and add new features with Android Pie like the redesigned recent apps overview, gesture controls, adaptive battery, app actions, adaptive brightness, and many more changes under the hood. With each major Android update, Google also updates the Compatibility.
Android’s camera Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) connects the higher level camera framework APIs in android.hardware.camera2 to your underlying camera driver and hardware.
Camera HAL3 is required for all devices running Android 9 or higher (except for Android Go devices).
Camera HAL3 features:
The aim of the Android Camera API redesign is to substantially increase the ability of applications to control the camera subsystem on Android devices while reorganizing the API to make it more efficient and maintainable.
- A Result object with metadata about the capture.
- One to N buffers of image data, each into its own destination Surface.
The set of possible output Surfaces is preconfigured:
- Each Surface is a destination for a stream of image buffers of a fixed resolution.
- Only a small number of Surfaces can be configured as outputs at once (~3).
The reason you should know about Camera HAL3.
If your phone support camera HAL3 then you can easily install third-party camera applications. so what is the big deal right? basically HAl3 is programming terms that check the camera module does support another camera application with full functionality or not.
