While Android has come a long, long way since its launch some years ago, there are still areas that need improvement. When it comes to stock Android, and therefore Nexus devices, both the camera and battery life are still sticking points for a lot of users, both new and old. Google has steadily improved battery life over the years, and with Android 6.0 Marshmallow set to drastically improve things, the future for the Nexus handset is a bright one. Just after the Nexus 5 was launched, Google released the Google Camera, a reimagining of the stock camera available for Android devices. It’s not the best out there, but it’s designed to be simple, intuitive and fairly quick. Lollipop introduced a whole new camera API, and it seems as though Google is about to get serious with the camera performance in new Nexus devices.
According to a new snippet of news from Artem Russakovskii, Google is testing a new Google Camera 3.0 with new features like Smart Burst and the inclusion of the Camera2 API. The new API was included in Android 5.0 Lollipop, and gives Android the ability to directly hook into the hardware on the device, even more so than before. There are apps available in the Play Store that already take advantage of the new Camera2 API, but it’s interesting to see that it’s taken Google this long to start testing and working on the new API in their own app. Testing it on upcoming hardware does, of course, make a lot of sense and considering that we’ve seen both the LG Nexus 5X and the larger Huawei Nexus leak out a number of times now, an update to the Google Camera could be just around the corner.
With the Camera2 API, Google could add a lot more features to the Google Camera app, but whether or not they want to bog down the app with complicated features that not everyone will appreciate remains to be seen. The new Nexus line of devices are apparently launching later this month, and when they do we’ll have all the news as soon as we get it.