Android 4.4 code commit reveals potential camera RAW support for the future
It’s not uncommon for software developers to have to temporarily shelve unfinished code for a project. That is exactly what happened with Android 4.4 and a new API that should please many cellphone photographers.
A look at AOSP source code commit comments reveals the team was working on new camera APIs, which could ultimately bring us support for RAW images, which is an uncompressed, high-information image file that can be manipulated using image editing software.
The AOSP commit suggests Android phones could some day not only view RAW images natively, but also save files in the RAW format (they currently save them in a compressed JPEG format) without any further post-processing. So if the code isn’t there, why can’t we use it?
Well, it simply wasn’t ready, apparently. A comment from the AOSP references the code, with a request from the maintainer to cease from merging the code into the operating system. We’re not yet sure what caused them to hold off — a last minute bug, perhaps. Or was it just not ready for public consumption?
Whatever the case may be, it makes us hopeful that it’s something Google will look to bring to the Android platform in future updates. How soon that will happen remains to be seen, but you can bet we’ll be waiting with much anticipation.
[via Ars Technica]