Apps you were crazy about in your day: Camera Zoom FX

In this series we remember Android applications that were very popular a while ago, such as Titanium Backup, Swype, Google Talk or World lens. Today it’s the turn of Camera Zoom FX, one of the camera apps with more tradition and popularity, despite being a paid app.

Camera Zoom FX has been described numerous times – also here– as one of the best camera apps for Android since its launch in 2009. More than ten years have passed and its name doesn’t resonate that much anymore, What became of Camera Zoom FX?

What was special about it?

All mobiles come with a camera application, which is also generally optimized to take full advantage of the phone’s hardware. Third-party camera apps, available from the app store, need offer something extra to capture the attention of users, and even more when we talk about paid applications, such as Camera Zoom FX.

That is exactly what Camera Zoom offered and does: many options in a single application, including more manual controls than usual, additional shooting modes – such as voice control – and infinity of filters and frames to decorate the photos in the style of Pixlr o matic, being able to even create collages without leaving the application.

Basically, Camera Zoom was an all-in-one photography app and that filled the gap power-user photography on mobile phones in the early days of Android, when there were still many shortcomings in the rest of the camera applications, especially in the one pre-installed on the terminals.

What has become of Camera Zoom FX?

Camera Zoom FX is one of the oldest applications for Android, being practically from the beginning. During these first years of Android, it was crowned on several occasions with the award for best photography application and his popularity peaked back in 2011, at the time of Android Honeycomb, although it remained highly recommended in the following years.

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Camera Zoom continued to be updated with improvements frequently, although upon reaching version 6.0 the updates began to spread out over time. Version 6.0 arrived in 2016, and today, four more years, the most recent version from July 2020 is version 6.3.7. Camera Zoom it kept updating, but not enough.

To this day, Camera Zoom FX is still for sale and available on Google Play with a slightly more modern design than the classic, but the truth is that the application has not evolved as much as Android has. The app was launched in the days before Holo and Material Design, and while it doesn’t look bad today, it could be better too.

Camera Zoom FX is still a complete camera app for Android, but the main problem is that the competition has put the batteries. On the one hand, the camera applications that are pre-installed on mobile phones now do include some of the Camera Zoom additions such as timelapse photography or manual adjustments. On the other hand, the tools to edit photos with filters and collages are available to everyone in apps like Google Photos, Instagram or Snapseed, to name a few.

This, if we talk about the added functions, one of the strengths of Camera Zoom, since if we talk about image processing It is clear that the Google Camera or Gcam has received all the attention since the first Google Pixel arrived, in 2016.

In short, with a Camera Zoom FX that has become almost static and a world of photography that evolves year after year, it is understandable that the application goes more unnoticed today than in the past, when it was obviously the most complete when it came to camera apps.

Does it still make sense today?

As we mentioned before, third-party camera apps are at a disadvantage Well, all mobiles come with a pre-installed application, although that does not mean that they are still necessary. Sometimes, the camera that comes with the mobile is not very good, it does not work well or we simply do not like it.

The concept of an off-road camera app It is still as valid today as it has always been, although the truth is that this type of application is still a bit more difficult to compete with the magic of processing that Google puts on its cameras or the pre-installed applications that increasingly include more functions added.

The best proof that Camera Zoom FX still makes sense is that it is still active on Google Play and harvesting downloads, plus there is a fair amount of quality camera apps out there. It remains to be seen if Google’s efforts to unify and extend the Camera API with initiatives like CameraX manages to get third-party camera apps to have a second resurgence in popularity, although for the moment I would wait seated.

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Apps you were crazy about in your day: Camera Zoom FX

was originally published in

Xataka Android

by
Ivan Ramirez

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