Key Takeaways
- Zerocam is an AI-free camera app that simplifies the experience to just a viewfinder and shutter button.
- The app’s restrictions force you to work on fundamental photography skills like composition and framing.
- Default smartphone camera apps have real biases that influence the look and feel of photos, prompting the need for alternative apps.
In 2024, there’s never been more ways to make an image. If it’s not the camera on your smartphone, it’s scribbling on a tablet with a stylus, or generating something horrendous with an AI image generator. And because it’s so easy to make an image from scratch, the decision around how you make them has never seemed more urgent.
The default camera app is the place most people head first, and it’s increasingly the source of heavily processed images that look good 95% of the time, but also increasingly don’t reflect the reality photos are supposed to capture. That AI-powered editing tools are integrated into multiple parts of the shooting and editing process makes things even stranger. Halide, a premium iPhone camera app I’ve covered here on Pocket-lint before, has tried to address this tension by giving users the option to skip their phone’s traditional image processing pipeline entirely. These “Process Zero” photos frequently look more natural than anything an iPhone shoots on its own, with shadows and texture that Apple’s desire to make things as easy as possible polishes away. But where does that leave Android users looking for something similar?
Zerocam, a camera app that’s just made its way to the Play Store, might be the answer. It strips photography down to it’s most basic components — composition and framing — and avoids the frequently dramatic image processing a Samsung or Google phone might normally do. But as I found using the app, those restrictions can pretty quickly make you question just what you want a smartphone camera to do, and if there is even one way for taking photos that will work for everyone.
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Zerocam turns your smartphone camera into a single button
The bare essentials of taking a photo
Whereas Halide is all about offering you more control over how you take your photos by surfacing information that your smartphone avoids or hides for simplicity’s sake, Zerocam thinks all of that is a distraction. Once you set it up, all the app is a viewfinder, a yellow shutter button, and toggle to cycle through the different lens options on your phone. There are no controls for focus or exposure, no additional photo modes if you want to shoot a time-lapse or a portrait shot, and no way to rotate the app’s interface when you want to shoot horizontally.
The iOS version of Zerocam offers a few more features than the Android version, including a widget that lets you track how many days you’ve used the app to take a photo.
The photos Zerocam takes are similarly barebones. If you’re used to the saturated colors and high dynamic range of a Pixel 9’s normal output, you might be surprised by what Zerocam captures. Photos absolutely feel more candid, but they’re also more washed out and colored strangely in bright direct light, and blurry in low-light and nighttime settings. If you’re not careful, it’s also pretty easy to take a photo that’s out of focus, which might be a turn-off if you’re used to reflexively tapping on your screen to adjust the focus of your photo.
Limitations force you to rely on fundamentals
When it comes down to it, the restrictions the app places on you by removing all the usual smartphone camera tools force you to develop photography fundamentals. Where should individual components like a building, person, or flower be placed in relation to each other? And what should be in the frame in the first place? These are the kinds of questions Zerocam naturally gets you to ask. The modern smartphone camera, which is generally biased towards quality at a high speed, doesn’t. You’re taking a picture because it’s something you want to capture and remember, not necessarily because you’re trying to create an interesting image.
In the short time I used Zerocam I can’t say it made me develop an “eye,” but it did force me to think about what I liked and what looked good to me. Is that a privilege the average person will want to pay for? I’m not so sure. You can download Zerocam for free and the app will let you capture five photos a day. If you pay $0.99 per month or $10 per year, you’ll get unlimited photos. That’s pretty reasonable as far as mobile app subscriptions go, but it still stands out when you compare it to the free built-in app on your phone.
Zerocam is admirable but impractical
A philosophical shift in what your smartphone camera should do
In principle, I appreciate how extreme Zerocam’s approach towards countering the AI excess of the default camera app. If you’re going to have an idea that runs counter to the norm, you might as well commit to it completely. If all current smartphone photography is too fussy and artificial, then removing everything down to the studs might be the solution — or at least the start of one.
But I didn’t have to use Zerocam for very long to learn that it wasn’t for me. I want more control over focus, or at least a grid that I can pull up to help with composing a shot. I might not yet be at the level where looking at a histogram is useful, but I would like the option to tweak the brightness or white balance, at the very least to see what things could look like. Zerocam doesn’t offer any of that. The app’s developer doesn’t feel like those settings are aligned with its purpose of letting you “Capture Moments, Not Megapixels,” per the app’s Play Store page.
If all current smartphone photography is too fussy and artificial, then removing everything down to the studs might be the solution — or at least the start of one.
If there’s anything I’ve realized while trying a dozen or so photo and video apps over the last few weeks, is that everyone is going to land somewhere differently when it comes to what they want their smartphone camera to do. That’s why it’s critical that these kinds of third-party apps are available in the first place. Clearly, there’s some kind of desire to do things differently than the kitchen-sink-approach phone maker’s use. Apps like Halide and Zerocam are meeting it.
Your smartphone camera is not neutral
Phone makers are pushing a specific look
Besides forcing me to decide what I wanted, using Zerocam also pushed me towards acknowledging that the default camera app on my phone is in no way neutral. Google, Samsung, and Apple all have an opinion of how photos should look and what you should be able to do to them. And if anything, these companies’ perspectives and standards are rapidly changing as they rush to incorporate generative AI into their photo features. Just because you have more control over how your final photo looks, doesn’t mean Apple doesn’t want you to think a certain way about your photos. Samsung’s Head of Customer Experience told TechRadar that “there’s no such thing as a real picture.” That is not something a neutral party says.
Zerocam
Zerocam takes Halide’s “Process Zero” feature to the extreme by removing all the camera features and image processing except for the shutter button.
Your smartphone camera and photos are only going to change more as time, software updates, and hardware releases march on. It’s more clear than ever that it’s up to us to decide if and how we engage with them. If you don’t care, and want to embrace chaos, there are plenty of photo editing features to try on the Pixel 9, Galaxy S24, and iPhone 16. And you don’t even need to have a new smartphone to use all of them.
