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If you don’t like the stock camera app that comes with your Android device, there are plenty of third-party camera apps for Android that you can try. These third-party camera apps often add advanced controls and pro-level camera filters that you won’t find in a standard camera app. On the other hand, they usually lack some of the basic features offered by the OEM camera app. The solution to this is for OEMs to package their features into an “extension” that third-party camera apps can use. Android currently supports five different types of extensions, but the upcoming Android 15 update may add support for a sixth extension called Eyes Free videography.

Under the hood, every camera app—whether it’s a stock OEM app or a third-party app—is built on top of Android’s Camera2 API (the Jetpack support library called CameraX is a Camera2 wrapper). The Camera2 Extensions API provides a way for camera applications to access extensions that OEMs have implemented on their devices. As of Android 14, the Camera2 Extensions API supports the following five types of extensions:

1. Automatic: “sets the expansion mode according to the current scene background”
2. Bokeh: “sharpens the foreground object and blurs the background”
3. Face Retouch: “corrects skin texture, under-eye tone and more”
4. HDR: “extends exposure range resulting in brighter photos”
5. night: “brightens photos in low light”

The availability of these five extensions varies greatly by device and brand. Samsung, for example, has implemented every extension for many of its devices, while Google has only implemented the Night extension on its latest Pixels. Also, these five extensions can only be used during previews and image capture, but not during video recordings.

The new Eyes Free videography Camera2 extension, in contrast, may be the first Camera2 extension on Android that can be used while recording video, judging by its name. This sixth Camera2 extension “aims to lock and stabilize a region or object of interest,” according to its AOSP description. This extension allows third-party apps that use the Camera2 API (such as Snapchat) to use this video stabilization algorithm.

Although the ISP and camera pipeline in most devices already support basic video stabilization regardless of the camera app used, more advanced stabilization techniques—like that mentioned by the Eyes Free videography extension—require little effort to maintain. Third-party developers creating camera apps that run on different types of Android devices struggle to create a universal implementation of features like night mode, HDR, bokeh, etc. that’s as good as the stock implementation. That’s why the Camera2 Extensions API exists to level the playing field and give third-party camera apps access to the same night mode, HDR, bokeh, etc. algorithms used by the standard OEM camera app . Android 15 just expands the list of available extensions to include a new Eyes Free videography extension, which we hope OEMs will implement.

Even if OEMs don’t implement Android 15’s new Eyes Free videography extension, the operating system may implement a software implementation that third-party camera apps can use. Under Settings > Security and privacy > More security and privacy, there’s a new “enable software camera extensions” switch that “allows default software implementation of advanced camera features such as Eyes Free videography.” While Android’s default implementation of Eyes Free videography may not be as good as OEM for a device, it will still ensure that this feature is available to third-party camera apps that request it.