OnePlus: “We’re Looking for Ways to Improve Camera on non-Oxygen OS ROMs”

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OnePlus has been doing a pretty good job with the OnePlus 3 and making it community friendly. Not only can you get the kernel sources for the device, you can also find the device tree along with the necessary files to get the proprietary Dash Charging solution working on custom ROMs and kernels.

But if you do plan to go down the custom ROM scene, you might find the camera experience on non-OxygenOS based custom ROMs to be a bit lacking. There’s a bunch of proprietary code at play in the background, and without that, custom ROMs outside of OxygenOS will have a tough time harnessing the full potential of the camera hardware.

OnePlus’s cofounder Carl Pei has stated they will try and bring the same OxygenOS experience over to custom ROMs.

“We’re looking for ways to provide our camera experience for non OxygenOS ROMs. No interest in open sourcing the camera stack.” Carl Pei

Wait, but they are not open sourcing the camera stack! How can this be good news?

For starters, the company is under no legal obligation to open source the camera stack. This falls under proprietary code, so they are well within their expected course of actions if they do not release anything on this. But, the promise can be fulfilled by releasing the blobs, in a manner similar to the Dash Charging situation.

Now, sultanxda’s ROM has claimed to have camera quality that is better than other non-OxygenOS custom ROMs. But Carl mentions that this is not completely optimized, and hence users are missing out.

This is good on OnePlus’s end, as they would be delivering something over and above what other mainstream OEMs ever bother with (with one notable exception). We hope OnePlus lives up to these words, like they did with Dash Charge.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you look forward to a complete camera experience on the OnePlus 3? Let us know in the comments below!