Posted by Donovan McMurray – Developer Relations Engineer
. The Extensions framework currently provides functionality like Night Mode for low-light image captures, Bokeh for applying portrait-style background blur, and Face Retouch for beauty filters. All of these features are implemented by the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in order to maximize the quality of each feature on the hardware it's running on.
Furthermore, exposing this OEM-specific functionality through the Extensions API allows developers to use a consistent implementation across all of these devices, getting the best of both worlds: implementations that are tuned to a wide-range of devices with a unified API surface. According to Nilesh Patel, a Software Engineer at Instagram, “for Meta’s billions of users, having to write custom code for each new device is simply not scalable. It would also add unnecessary app size when Meta users download the app. Hence our guideline is ‘write once to scale to billions’, favoring platform APIs.”
More and more OEMs are supporting Extensions, too! There are already over 120 different devices that support the Camera Extensions, representing over 75 million monthly active users. There’s never been a better time to integrate Extensions into your Android app to give your users the best possible camera experience.
Impact on Instagram
The results of adding Night Mode to Instagram have been very positive for Instagram users. Jin Cui, a Partner Engineer on Instagram, said “Night Mode has increased the number of photos captured and shared with the Instagram camera, since the quality of the photos are now visibly better in low-light scenes.”
Compare the following photos to see just how big of a difference Night Mode makes. The first photo is taken in Instagram with Night Mode off, the second photo is taken in Instagram with Night Mode on, and the third photo is taken with the native camera app with the device’s own low-light processing enabled.
Ensuring Quality through Image Test Suite (ITS)
instead of the standard guide.
Implementing the Progress Bar and PostView Image
For an even more elevated user experience, you can provide feedback while the Night Mode capture is processing. In Android 14, we added callbacks for the progress and for post view, which is a temporary image capture before the Night Mode processing is complete. The below code shows how to use these callbacks in the file in the Camera2Extensions sample app.
Implementing the Moon Icon Indicator
Another user-focused design touch is showing the moon icon to let the user know that a Night Mode capture will happen. It’s also a good idea to let the user tap the moon icon to disable Night Mode capture. There’s an upcoming API in Android 16 next year to let you know when the device is in a low-light environment.
Here are the possible values for the Night Mode Indicator API:
- The camera is unable to reliably detect the lighting conditions of the current scene to determine if a photo will benefit from a Night Mode Camera Extension capture.
UNKNOWN
- The camera has detected lighting conditions that are sufficiently bright. Night Mode Camera Extension is available but may not be able to optimize the camera settings to take a higher quality photo.
OFF
- The camera has detected low-light conditions. It is recommended to use Night Mode Camera Extension to optimize the camera settings to take a high-quality photo in the dark.
ON
Next Steps
Read more about Android’s camera APIs in the . Once you’ve got the basics down, check out the program.
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