Short story:

I managed to install a fully working, modified, Google Camera app used in Pixel 2/Pixel 2 XL, on my Moto G5 Plus. With the camera hardware & software now essentially same as that of Google’s flagship, the results & improvements are quite stunning. If you thinking the title is an exaggeration, see the samples further down in the article and then decide for yourself. Download links, stability notes are at the end of the article.

Sounds interesting? Here’s the full story:

As you can tell by the title, I own a G5 Plus, a not-bad & not-great budget phone that I bought almost an year ago. As soon as I got my hands on it, I was excited because of two reasons: close to stock Android (which should translate to fast updates) & the camera (with the hype that it was on par with S7’s).

But as the time passed, my excitement started to fade slowly. The Lenovo owned Motorola started to show its laziness with updates & and the hype that camera was as good as S7 didn’t turn out to be very true in actual use case(again, blame Motorola for bad software).

Later while digging on internet, I learned that this phone has great camera hardware. In fact, it has the exact same rear camera sensor(Sony IMX362) as the one used in Google’s camera monster, the Pixel 2 duo. Now my excitement was back because I could, in theory, install the tweaked Google Camera app floating around on the internet and have same quality of photos as taken by the Pixel 2(minding the difference the processing power due to different SoCs, of course).

But this great plan was stuck with a hindrance: no Camera2 API support & 64bit OS on my phone, both of which the Google Camera required. Both issues could be solved by flashing a 64-bit custom ROM on my phone but that would’ve voided my phone’s warranty & could’ve lead to unexpected annoyances like banking apps refusing to work. So I backed off, eagerly waiting for the official Oreo update from Motorola (which it promised in September of last year).

Meanwhile I continued using Mototrola’s default camera app. Neither the app nor its photo-processing was great, considering the potential of the hardware it was utilizing. The Play Store rating of the app tell the same story.

I waited for full 8 months since the time the promise of update was made… until I got stick of waiting & finally decided to move on (which was few days back). I unlocked the bootloader, flashed recovery, installed a 8.1 based custom ROM – all within an hour. Thankfully, the installed custom ROM was a 64-bit build and had Camera2 API support as well (devs, as always, did a better job than OEMs)

Now the game began, to find the ideal version of Google Camera Mod(short for modified) – because there are hundreds of versions of it for a lot of phones.

After a lot of digging various forums, websites, trials and tweaking, I got one of the versions to work without any hiccups on my phone. The best part: it was all worth it because the results are so damn good and differences are very noticeable. Unfortunately, I don’t have the comparably photos taken from Motorola’s default camera app. However, I’ve taken non-HDR vs HDR+ photos using the Google Camera app for comparison and they show the full potential of this phone’s camera hardware prowess. See for yourself:



Note: If you’re unable to view the album below properly, please visit the desktop/ non-AMP version of this site. You can also right click > ‘Open image in new tab’ to see any image in full resolution (which I recommend doing, to properly grasp the quality)

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Couple of things to note here:

None of the photos have been post-processed (not even the basic brightness, contrast etc. fixes). Also note that I’ve tried to include samples from different lighting situations: from bright, sunny morning to night.

Better looking images are taken with HDR+ on while their counterparts were taken with HDR off. To keep the comparison fair, I’ve used either autofocus or focus on the same spot for all pairs of photos.

While non-HDR images are really good looking by themselves, HDR+ plus brings out the pure raw performance of the camera. Especially in low-light shots, the difference is day & night (literally, in some cases!). In any situation, the photos taken by this app are unarguably much better than those taken by Motorola’s stock camera app.

Portrait works exceedingly well and edge-detection is very accurate.

HDR images(not shown in samples) stand between the normal & HDR+ images. So, HDR+ shows a significant & immediately percievable diffrence as compared to the non-HDR images.

There’s a LOT of details. Zoom all the way in on any photo and you’ll see what I mean.

What’s even better is that processing is surprisingly fast and doesn’t take too much time to be an inconvenience(almost zero shutter lag), despite of resource-hungry algorithms running on the budget favourite SD625 chip-set. Also, the much touted portrait mode works as advertised & its just amazing. The edge detection and details are on point.

To get an idea of how much improvement we’re talking about here, I put together a few of photos taken many days back using Moto camera app (on official firmware).

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To conclude, I’m both extremely happy & awestruck at the same time by the power of software processing combined with great hardware. Thanks to open nature of Android and all those self-less developers out there, one can easily take full control of their phone’s hardware with right tools.

This also makes me wonder if sometimes OEMs just use software to cripple the hardware based on device pricing (but if that’s the case, why not use a cheaper hardware in the first place?). In any case, all these modding & flashing shenanigans have collectively turned my G5 Plus into a camera beast, with results comparable to current (at the time of writing this) camera champion, the Pixel 2, which costs at least thrice as much as my phone.

I’ll update this article when a newer version with same or better stability is available. So, do check back if you’re interested. If you happen to have a unlocked G5 Plus(running a 64-bit OS with Camera2 API support) or are curious to try out this version of GCam, download it right away!

Current stable version:

New: Google Camera Fu24 Mod ( Download )

Other:

Google Camera Minimal Mod ( Download )

Google Camera Pixel2Mod V6 ( Download )

Stability notes:

The minimal version has very few settings and almost every feature works.

Suggested settings:

• Since the app is stable, it doesn’t need much changes and in fact, just works right after installing without any changes.

You can configure the HDR+ parameter in settings to your liking (higher is better but also takes longer than process the photos). I suggest a value between medium to very high.

JPEG quality of another settings you can tweak, and again higher value produces better photos(only visible if you zoom in a lot) but at the cost of increased file size). Suggested value is between 95 to 100.

Special thanks to B-S-G and Arnova8G2 who made this mod, giving a much required boost for our phones!

If have made it all the way till here, you’re indeed paying attention. Let me know if this mod made any difference in the picture quality for you.

If want to say something or have any query, be sure to drop a comment below, I’m all ears 🙂 Cheers!