In a move that will affect millions of smartphone users, Google is removing a key Android feature amid privacy concerns. 

According to a report in Android Police, Android 11, the next version of the world’s most popular mobile operating system, will prevent apps from using third-party camera software to take photos. Instead, the phone’s default built-in camera app will have to be used.

When taking photos, current versions of Android allow apps to display a pop-up camera picker from which the user can select their preferred camera app. However, this option has been removed in Android 11. 

This means users who installed popular camera apps such as VSCO, Adobe Lightroom or A Better Camera, will have to revert to their phone’s built-in camera software when taking photos or video from within another app. Users will still be free to use any camera app they wish by launching it directly. Only the camera picker option is affected.

The new restriction exists to prevent apps from grabbing your location without permission. Even if an app has been denied access to your location data, it’s still possible to circumvent this restriction when using third-party camera apps.

The problem arises because camera apps typically embed location data within their image files, and without the new restriction there’s no way to prevent this information from being returned to the calling app along with the photo. 

While I can understand Google’s reasoning here, the current solution feels like an unnecessary inconvenience that doesn’t completely solve the problem. Disabling the camera picker doesn’t prevent images, complete with embedded location data, from being uploaded from the gallery instead.

Anyone updating to a new version of Android will surely be surprised and frustrated to find such a convenient feature removed, so I hope a more elegant solution can be found sooner rather than later. A simple way for advanced users to re-enable the camera picker would probably do just fine.