The Surface machines from Microsoft actually stand out in this regard. Because the brains of the machine are in the same section as the screen and camera, they are a lot thicker and can put in pretty decent camera modules.

There's probably a good opportunity for home office external displays to incorporate smartphone cameras, studio mikes, and maybe even lighting elements to help people look good while working from home.

companies that are crushed by demand for existing products, and dealing with covid-related supply chain issues, and long-term uncertainty about demand aren't going to have a lot of luck getting a new high-end product out in <9 months.

among other reasons, getting these sorts of things made usually requires some travel by the engineers to the manufacturing/assembly facility to sort out problems.

it might need a mount to be properly positionned, but that would be the only IRL hurdle. On the software front I don’t know how good the current options are, but fixing bugs should be doable.

- You need to fiddle with your phone (which is probably mounted to a monitor?) any time you want to turn on your webcam

- There's a perceptible lag on the final video, not ideal

- Phone needs an external power source, charging-over-USB usually isn't enough to power a phone with an always-on camera

- The phone will get hot, as it's not designed to run camera constantly

- For Android, your best option is to stream video over USB, which means enabling ADB and developer settings, which is inherently insecure. It also makes the charging problem above trickier, as phones usually only have the one port.

Honestly the best phone-based solution right now is to join the meeting twice - once on your personal phone for sending video, and once on your computer for sending/receiving audio/screenshares.

Personally I don't think they'll even take half of this market - it means you can't fiddle with your phone while on a call.

Keeping in mind this is for a feature that most people actually don't care about.

Take that $15 and apply to 8 other things. The memory. The speaker. The keyboard. Your $500 laptop is now $600. Your competitor is still $500. You lose.

I Skype with family a couple of times a week. I'd gladly pay another $100-200 for a better integrated webcam.

Now with everyone working remotely I could see a quality demand happening but no where near the interest in phone cams.

I've had success using my iPhone for video capture via OBS. The setup was a bit fiddly, but still only took an hour-ish to try this approach by downloading and installing OBS, figuring out I needed a virtualcam plugin, finding it and fiddling w config, creating a dirt-simple "scene", and enabling it for use in Zoom. This is on an iPhone X (iOS 14.2), and Catalina (macOS 10.15.7).