Why Google Camera Doesn’t Work And How To Fix It

The best camera app for Android is GCam, or, as it is also called, Google Camera, Google Camera, or GCam. Its only drawback is limited availability. After all, Google originally designed a Google camera specifically for Pixel smartphones. It was only much later that enthusiastic developers were able to port the application to other smartphones. But since they could not foresee all the variables, it simply did not work on many devices. Let’s figure out why Google Camera doesn’t work and what to do to make it work again.

To begin with, Google Camera is basically not designed to work on any smartphones other than the Google Pixel. Therefore, the fact that it does not work on your Samsung, Xiaomi, or Huawei is a priori nothing strange. This was planned from the very beginning. But if you are not satisfied with this explanation, read on.

If you find that the Google Camera app doesn’t work on your phone, there can be different reasons. The culprit can be the cache data itself or it’s the hardware part that couldn’t support this application well. No worries, we discuss some most common GCam app issues and correct them with the right methods.

Google Camera is not installed

The main reason why Google Camera is not installed on non-Google smartphones is hardware incompatibility. This is most often seen on devices with Kirin, MediaTek and Exynos processors. The fact is that Google Pixel smartphones run only on Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, so the developers of the search giant do not even include support for all other types of hardware.

But this, as we have already found out, is done by enthusiasts who often also adapt the hacked version of GCam only for popular “stones”. They are simply not interested in working if the result of their work is not appreciated by anyone. Therefore, they tend to simply ignore processors that are not particularly popular with consumers.

The solution to the problem: try downloading the new version of Google Camera (for today it is build number 8.1) or change the smartphone to another. For example, the first method does not help me with my Honor View 20. You can find Gcam for your smartphone using this link. Updates regularly appear there, which must be installed manually.

Google camera crashes

Another common scenario that users encounter is Google Camera crashes. That is, the installation of the application is successful, but each attempt to launch it fails. There may be several reasons for this behavior.

The smartphone does not support Google services. This problem is typical mainly for devices from Chinese no-names, but most likely, they cannot be helped at all, and Huawei and Honor devices. There is a simple solution for them – simple installation of the microG app.

Your Android version is out of date. If you are trying to install GCam on a smartphone with Android 8.0 and an older version of the OS, it is quite possible that the application will crash, because most enthusiastic developers prefer not to support very old versions of Android. Installing an older version of Google Camera will help you.

It is also possible that, at first, the Google camera works normally on the device, and then it starts to crash. This is most likely due to a conflict in the configuration files that were loaded by the application automatically. In this case, either install a new version of GCam or go to Settings -> Applications -> Google Camera and clear the cache and uninstall the installed updates.

Google Camera App Alternatives

As you can see, in most cases, the solution to the problem is to update the Google Camera. Even if the application does not support your smartphone right now, it is possible that support will still appear in one of the future versions.

The main thing is to find a developer who will be interested in, say, adapting Gcam for Kirin processors or embedding the Camera2 API directly into the application so that users do not have to get root rights and roll it up on their own.

I’d love to end the post with a recommendation of several Google Camera analog apps, but unfortunately, this is an absolutely unique phenomenon today. The fact is that the original Google camera is a set of software methods for creating a photo, in which, in addition to the application itself, API Camera2 also participates (a kind of driver that is a gasket between hard and software), and it is not found on all smartphones.

Therefore, no matter how regrettable it may be for me to report this, there are simply no alternatives for Google Camera today.