The camera is so bad that it's even a shame that they bothered adding it. The additional cost for the hardware clearly wasn't worth it.

If Pine64 didn't include hardware that wasn't fully software supported at any arbitrary point in time then the PinePhone as a whole wouldn't exist in the first place.

The thing with the cameras is there's hardly anyone putting effort into them - on average around ~1 person is working on the entire camera stack in their free time (there's a number of people, but none spend their whole time on the cameras). So it's honestly pretty amazing how far we've already come.

Seconded. It's been several years of development time and I still think I'd get better pictures with one of those cameras that saved pictures on floppy disks.

I've bought two Pinephones and I hope things go well but man, I install Mobian and wonder what exactly their long term plan is... it runs like an absolute dog, worse than a $30 Android prepaid phone. The only way to get reasonable performance has been to use sxmo, which is ok for me but not the experience normal people want.

If you need a good camera, consider Librem 5 instead.

Note that while it's already possible to get really good looking photos out of L5 camera, there's still quite a lot of software work left to do for it to work in an effortless point-and-shoot fashion. It will come, just be aware it's not there yet.

Iphone’s are ridiculously good from a lock screen to shoot perspective, especially with live images.