I am very much fed up and ready to get on board with you but one thing that holds me back is photo quality.

Nowadays camera sensors are only half the story and most of the iphone-like photo quality is achieved in software.

Have we reached a point where non-OEM apps can deliver something comparable to the market expectations from big manufacturers?

I am ok with narrow combinations e.g. if you use app X on Hardware Y you have amazing photo results.

Is there something along those lines that anyone can recommend?

There's a whole GCam (Google Camera) modding community that manages to get image quality that's often better than what non-pixel OEM vendors offer. These ports usually work on LineageOS (and other ROMs) This site has a large collection of models and the config files generated for each device: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/ I think they link to some Telegram channels too where people share the kinds of photography they get with the modifications.

That is exactly the type of answer I was looking for, thank you.

This brings up a slightly tangential question I have. Is other peoples photography like other peoples dreams?

In that no one cares about it unless they're in it.

>one thing that holds me back is photo quality

But... why? I use open camera. It works. It takes pictures. Those pictures look alright, pretty damn good even. I certainly don't look at them and go "well blimey I just can't tell what this picture is meant to be".

Whatsapp ends up destroying the quality when I send them to friends anyway.

Like, maybe if you've got a huge instagram following and a patreon drawing in money based off that or something? I dunno, it's just one of those things I really can't wrap my head around, so long as I've got a picture I'm happy.

The commenter explained why. (they mentioned the iPhone specifically; this may be the case moreso on there, I don’t follow Android)

It’s because there is a metric shitton of software that goes into the camera app itself, and access to the camera’s hardware does absolutely nothing to enable these features.

IIRC there’s actually some sort of crazy ML shit behind Apple’s native camera app; I would be very curious to see what a raw photo from the same sensor would look like in comparison.

Having said that whatsoever validates the commenter’s point.

> I would be very curious to see what a raw photo from the same sensor would look like in comparison

Raw format photography (ProRAW specifically) has been officially supported on iPhones since around iOS 14.3 (which was released in late 2020), and plenty of people have reviewed that functionality already.

As for how it would look specifically, it is difficult to give a straightforward answer, because RAW photos require a good amount of manual processing. And the final result of is going to look 100% subjective depending on the person and how they manully processed it. Just like how the same would be the case for RAW photos taken with a DSLR.

Secure Camera by GrapheneOS[1] is what you're looking for. It's built on the latest CameraX API, which means it supports all the modern sensors.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.grapheneos...

Or GrapheneOS with sandboxed Play Store.

Enough people need to adopt them, for it to truly be effective. At which point they just become the new Google.

Not really, if anything, they (Murena) become new Canonical. There's still Debian (LineageOS in this case) when they overplay their hand (like Ubuntu is doing with snap).