Camera

A GTK4/libadwaita camera application for FuriOS and other Halium-based Linux phones (maybe, the only other phone I can test is the Pixel 3a running Droidian and it doesn't work there).

Camera drives the FuriCam Camera2 engine from a native GTK4 frontend. The 0.2.0 milestone proves the stack end to end: a real Camera2 viewfinder, full-resolution stills, hardware-encoded video, settings, a rotating level and an in-app media gallery inside a Flatpak. Feature parity with FuriCam or at least close to it is planned. Might abandon FuriCam for this at some point because furios-camera will keep developing as well but let's see.

Features

• live preview through GtkGLArea, letterboxed to the still aspect ratio and redrawn at the engine's capture rate (30 fps)
• full-resolution JPEG capture (the engine asks the sensor for its largest JPEG stream; on the FuriPhone this is 5152×3864)
• asynchronous capture feedback: the UI reports when the JPEG is actually written, not when the request is submitted
• a read-only media viewer inside the main window: the last-media thumbnail (by default) and the hamburger Gallery item push a swipeable carousel of photos and videos from the Camera folders. Photos fill the window; videos show their paused first frame and play in-app with GStreamer, and only the visible page keeps a decoder loaded. The header has Back and “Open Externally” buttons. A Settings switch makes the last-media thumbnail open the latest item externally instead; the “Ask Which App to Open Media” switch forces the portal app chooser for external opens. On a keyboard, the arrow keys change pages, Space/Return play or pause a video, and Escape closes the viewer
• black preview canvas and header bar; the preview sits above a dedicated control bar, so it is centered between the header and the shutter row rather than behind the controls
• portrait-locked preview with its aspect ratio derived from the active sensor orientation; video mode switches the preview to 16:9
• 1080p or 4K H.264 recording with a live viewfinder, record/stop button and timer; it requests 30 fps but the HAL may pick a lower AE rate in low light. AAC audio is included when the build finds GStreamer. 4K may be unstable on this HAL and is marked as such in Settings
• camera switching while idle in video mode; cameras that cannot do video fall back to photo mode with a warning
• pinch zoom (also +/-) with a zoom indicator
• tap-to-focus with a reticle; F focuses the center. Focus is applied on release and only for a stationary tap, so swipes and pinches don't trigger it
• flash menu in the header: Off / On / Torch; On uses the still flash, Torch is continuous, and front cameras disable the menu. With flash On, tap-to-focus uses a brief AF-assist torch and turns it off once focus settles
• a Settings dialog in the hamburger menu with per-camera photo resolution using every advertised JPEG size/aspect (typically 4:3 and 16:9, plus any other native sizes the camera exposes), JPEG quality tiers (Original/Balanced/Medium/Small), video resolution (1080p/4K), an optional video stabilization (EIS) switch, a 3×3 composition grid toggle, a rotating FuriCam-style level line, and the “Ask Which App to Open Media” / “Open Thumbnail Externally” preferences. The quality tiers map to the camera's JPEG quality 100/70/40/20; they are deliberately names rather than percentages because the HAL chooses the actual compression, and the JPEG is written by the HAL directly without an on-disk re-encode
• video files are written to ~/Videos/Camera/VID_*.mp4; the gallery plays them in-app, and external opening uses the system portal
• device-rotation-aware still capture through iio-sensor-proxy
• flip (front/back) button in the bottom row beside the shutter, and a camera picker in the header that includes every enumerated camera, including the secondary back camera
• front-camera preview mirroring
• a Flatpak manifest with the permissions the Halium camera stack needs

Roadmap

Not implemented yet:

• richer gallery features (delete/share, pinch/double-tap zoom, cached video poster frames), HDR, RAW, and the manual exposure/ISO/shutter “pro” controls. The engine already exposes most of these through its C API; the UI is the remaining work.

Known limitations:

• Flash On uses the engine's still-flash path but does not run FuriCam's full preflash/AF-assist capture sequence yet.
• Video frame rate can drop in low light because the engine's AE range is 15–30 fps.
• 4K recording may be unstable on this HAL; 1080p is the safe default.
• Video stabilization (EIS) crops the video field of view; it is off by default in Settings.
• The level uses SensorFW (com.nokia.SensorService). If that service is unavailable, the line has no readings.
• The gallery is read-only for now: no delete/share, and video playback depends on the runtime's GStreamer H.264/AAC decoders (present on FuriOS).
• The preview is portrait-locked by design; saved photos and videos follow the device tilt.
• The Flatpak is self-hosted because it needs --device=all and the Halium paths, so it is not suitable for Flathub (also vibe coded as hell).

Building

Desktop / non-Halium

The default build does not compile the Camera2 engine; it uses a no-camera backend so the GTK UI can be developed and tested without libhybris.

meson setup build
meson compile -C build

FuriOS / FuriPhone Flatpak

The Flatpak build enables the Camera2 backend:

sudo flatpak-builder --system --install --force-clean builddir io.github.nico359.camera.json
flatpak run io.github.nico359.camera

Use --user instead of --system if the SDK, runtime and Rust extension are installed in the user installation. The SDK and extension are system-wide on FuriOS, so --system is the default here.

Requirements:

• org.gnome.Sdk//51 and the matching Rust extension. The SDK metadata declares org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension version 26.08, so install org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable//26.08.
• On FuriOS, the Flatpak setup already injects /android, /system, /vendor and /dev/binder into every sandbox. The manifest only asks for --device=all; without that FuriOS integration the app can build but will not find the camera HAL.
• The Flatpak is self-hosted on purpose. --device=all and the Halium paths make it unsuitable for Flathub.
• The thumbnail uses the system OpenURI portal. It does not request the broad org.freedesktop.Flatpak host-exec permission. The first open may show an app chooser; the portal remembers the choice per content type afterwards.

The camera engine links libhybris at runtime through the org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.hybris extension; it does not copy host libraries into /app.

Release builds use Cargo's release profile with LTO, a single codegen unit and stripped symbols. The Flatpak manifest already builds with -Dbuildtype=release.

Configuration

meson_options.txt has one option:

meson setup build -Dcamera2=true

camera2 is only useful on Halium devices. It compiles the vendored engine in src/engine/camera2 and requires EGL headers in the build environment.

Audio recording is enabled automatically when pkg-config finds gstreamer-1.0 and gstreamer-app-1.0. Without them the engine builds its video-only AAC stub and recording still works, just without sound.

Credits

• The Camera2 engine is vendored from FuriCam and was also mostly vibe coded and contributed by Sean Pollard. FuriCam is based on FuriOS-camera by Furi Labs.
• Overall design inspiration was taken from GNOME Snapshot.
• The UI is built with GTK4 and libadwaita and follows GNOME design conventions.

AI Disclosure

This application was built with the assistance of AI (OpenCode with DeepSeek).

Licensing

The application is GPL-2.0-or-later. The vendored FuriCam Camera2 engine is GPL-2.0-only; see src/engine/camera2/README.md. A binary that links the engine is distributed under GPL-2.0. The app code alone may also be used under GPL-3.0-or-later, but distributing the combined work under GPL-3.0 would require permission from the engine copyright holders.

FuriCam itself is based on FuriOS-camera (GPL-2.0-only, Furi Labs/Droidian Project) and remains GPL-2.0-only unless its copyright holders agree otherwise. This is not legal advice.