Moment ceases development of Pro Camera for Android

Moment has announced that they will no longer continue to make an Android version of their Pro Camera app, as the fragmentation that characterizes the popular mobile OS is far too great for their limited developer team to handle.

Moment directed the blame for this decision at Android’s fragmentation. The mobile operating system has 2.5 billion monthly active devices, but they’re running different versions and recent releases struggle to gain traction. Google’s Pixel phones get software updates first, but Google’s partners often take several months, or up to a year, to roll out the latest version of Android to third-party hardware. Fragmentation splinters the platform, and Moment doesn’t want to focus on multiple versions with its limited resources.

“We love Android, but unfortunately, we don’t have the engineering bandwidth to continue developing this app,” Moment co-founder Marc Barros said in an email to customers.

Barros stated that the company have spent two full years trying to make their Android app work flawlessly, and they just can’t deliver a pro-level manual camera for that platform. Each phone maker is introducing their own customization’s, giving developers different levels of access to the camera units of their devices, so it’s impossible to create something that works well with every device out there.

In addition to the endless list of Android devices, each time Google releases a new major version of their OS, everything breaks again and app developers are back to point zero. The ‘Moment’ team tried to convince phone manufacturers to share technical details about their cameras each time, but this effort didn’t yield very positive results. 

Moment is making lenses for smartphones, enabling users to capture pro-grade quality images and videos. Professionals require features like manual settings for ISO, exposure, focus, and shutter speed, ability to shoot RAW, shoot in burst mode, get live histogram, use de-squeezing anamorphic algorithms, select different color profiles, monitor the brightness and exposure waveform, shoot on different bitrates, get a dual-channel audiometer, and many more.

All of that is exactly what the ‘Moment Pro Camera’ app is offering, and what the team has been trying to bring on Android before they gave up.

Moment says that the Pro Camera app for Android will remain publicly available on the Play Store for the foreseeable future.

Therefore, the app will remain as it is on the Play Store, not receiving any updates or support from now on, while the iOS app will continue to be fully supported and regularly updated.