* No touch-id in the shutter button
* No cell phone connectivity / android app support to instantly share your photos to insta, fb, etc & to sync as you go.
* No ordering prints right in the camera
* No google pixel / iOS quality level HDR & night sight modes
* No GPS
* No braindead obvious webcam mode
* Most can't run off a usb cable indefinitely, unlike smartphones
* etc
Marc Levoy (the brains behind Google's amazing Computational Photography technology), said that he had gone to the Camera companies before and they rejected his proposals. Camera companies were too afraid that someone was going to take a photo, and it would end up looking bad, and result in people returning their camera.
Source: Somewhere in this excellent course shared by Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7HrM-fk_Rc&list=PL7ddpXYvFX...
All of the recent (4+ years) cameras have a "share to mobile" feature, where the camera acts as an AP, and your phone connects to pull photos from it. You can either pick the photos to transfer on the camera or on the phone, and it works pretty well for posting to social media, or instantly sharing.
I've run the RX100M3/M5 and a7iii off of USB power forever (a full day's worth of being a webcam via HDMI capture). You can get a battery eliminator for the older a7 models -- while it does require additional hardware and hassle, they do work, and can run off of USB.
The a7iii _finally_ supports some level of geotagging by using the GPS in your phone, and using a BLE connection to get location. It's not as good as a built in GPS, but it's better than recording a track log and syncing later.
I updated the -- again, full featured, but clunky -- remote app earlier and had to enter my account information using the camera 4-way stick, one letter at a time, as if it's 1995.
Edit -- forgot the best part: during the update, the camera locked up displaying "Updating, do not turn off". Lovely. (I turned it off -- removed the battery --, it still works.)
In the case of Nikon, the proprietary app for doing this was quite terrible, across all of their cameras that I tried it with. They released a firmware that opened up things up in the past year, though; better late than never. There have been brute-forced reverse-engineered alternative solutions but they have always been a pain to set up, use and maintain.
I suspect the other manufacturers' apps wouldn't be much better.
What's most amazing to me is how ineffective camera company's have been at getting a healthy ecosystem of tools/softwares growing. There was a brief bold attempt with the Samsung Galaxy Camera[1] to mate a decent camera with the Android OS & bring the well-known development environment, but it didn't take off. I still think this is the best chance camera folks have to be relevant, but there needs to be a bigger base of developer know-how incubated & grown. Starting expert communities is hard.
Meanwhile, it turns out Sony's modern cameras actually do run Android, they just don't expose it. There are some really neat apps, for time lapse, for uploading to photo services, for a bunch of random itch-scratch wants/needs built atop this. It's all unofficial apps. I don't think there's much work done with video & video streaming, which is where, I think a lot of the ubicomp/ubiquotous & pervasive computing currents wants & needs are. But this is, from what I can see, one of the most interesting & open places for playing with media, short of buying an Android phone & relying on it's sensors.
Don't get me wrong: I still have a standalone Fuji camera, but I'm unusually interested in photo aesthetics. For most people, ease of use and convenience wins, and that it took this long for Sony to release software to enable this pretty obvious functionality explains what's wrong with most of the big camera companies.