Unfortunately, the Linux phone I've been waiting for has to have a top-notch camera. So I'll sadly be waiting a long time unless I want to lug around an extra device just for photos.
The only thing they say about the camera is megapixel count for the single front and single rear camera. This is a very clear sign that the camera is an afterthought tacked onto the phone. I have zero faith in its hardware or software.
I'm in a weird position where I definitely care enough about phone cameras that I make most of my phone purchasing positions based on the camera, but I also don't care so much about photography that I'd be willing to carry around a traditional bulky camera. I travel and hike a lot, and enjoy trying to take nice photos of beautiful things, so it's very important to me that the phone does a good job at that without encumbering me.
Maybe for my next device I'll end up just switching to a Linux phone and then carrying around an iPhone or Android just for the camera and 2FA / banking apps.
For me, the camera gets more important as I get older. I realise that, althougth I'm not into photography either, it's very easy to capture day-to-day memories.
However, I'm one of those people who would never buy a dedicated camera. I'm just not into it that much.
I'm courious to see if the hardware would be OK. If so, how much more can we get by writing good software. After all, there's only so much we can improve with hardware until it becomes irrelevant!?
Yeah, software is a big part of this and can hopefully improve it. But it's also a huge undertaking. I strongly suspect that computational photograhy improvements make up a majority of Apple, Google, and Samsung's smartphone research spending. It's the main thing that drives sales of their most expensive phones. There's a gigantic amount of closed source research / development to catch up with.
But also there's some important hardware features that just aren't possible to make up for in software (e.g. my 3x zoom camera module is really important to me).
