I disagree; I think your overall point is correct, that people want high quality photos beyond what phone sensors and lenses can achieve, and they want the power of their phones software.

Thing is though, most camera makers are kind of crap at software in general, and their UX teams are nonexistent. So being able to delegate to your phone makes a fair bit of sense to the people who'd like that, even if you're not one of them.

It makes so much sense that there's even a second team taking a crack at it that I wasn't aware of: https://www.alice.camera/

That said, this is still a niche within a niche: I don't think either will be some mass market product. But being able to take my phone and a Alice or a SwitchLens to a concert in both pockets is pretty neat.

These will more replace the things like the Fujifilm X70, or a lot of what people use the X100(roman numeral) for, while getting the workflow benefits you're rightfully after.

I don't trust a camera manufacturer to keep their Android deployment up to date, or even to really fix that many bugs in it, and a whole Android OS is a lot more complex for them to manage than SwitchLens/Alice's apps and internal RTOS + comms layers.

Other alternative would be for one of the big players in the mirrorless space to open up their operating systems, but Fujifilm's X series communication app is bad that I simply don't see it as feasible: they really are terrible at software.

> It makes so much sense that there's even a second team taking a crack at it that I wasn't aware of: https://www.alice.camera/

It's a good idea, but I just don't think it's going to work. The mechanical connection between the phone and camera is awkward, and connectivity through Bluetooth/WiFi can not be seamless enough. Especially in challenging radio environments (like a concert).

> I don't trust a camera manufacturer to keep their Android deployment up to date, or even to really fix that many bugs in it, and a whole Android OS is a lot more complex for them to manage than SwitchLens/Alice's apps and internal RTOS + comms layers.

Android can allow third-party software, much easier than hacking into the proprietary OS.

Android allows, sure, but these systems have a chicken-and-egg problem where their sensors aren't exposed in a way that third party apps actually access to the ability they can. The YN455 has this problem today. Plus, it doesn't change the fact that you want that phone-camera to get android updates for security purposes, and now you're back to the fact that most camera makers are pretty crap at user facing operating systems. I think it's an impedance mismatch, really