CyanogenMod recently unveiled Phase 1 of Nemesis. That happened to be a camera app called Focal and as of yesterday we learned the app was being included in the CM10.2 nightly builds. We suspect many avoid those early builds, however it looks like you can now check out the Focal camera app all the same.
An apk for the Focal app has recently appeared for download and it can be installed on a wide variety of devices. You will need to download and sideload the apk, but otherwise, it seems to function fairly well. We say fairly, because well, there have been some small issues since we began playing earlier today. Nothing major, just a few random crashes. But on the bright side, the Focal camera app installs alongside your regular camera app.
It can also be uninstalled should it prove to be especially buggy on your device. In our testing we have the app running on a Galaxy S III with CM10.1.2 and on a Galaxy S 4 Active running Android 4.2.2 with TouchWiz. Neither device seems better than the other, but we can say the Focal app was a welcomed addition on the Galaxy S III as the current default CyanogenMod camera app isn’t all that much.
The Focal app is rather full-featured. It has options to switch between the front and rear-facing camera and can capture still images and video. There is also an option to shoot Panorama and PicSphere images. These options are all available by way of the shutter button. You just need to tap/hold on the shutter button and slide your finger out to access these other options.
The other aspect of the Focal app comes with the settings/options. Those are available by way of a hidden sidebar. To access this just slide that sidebar in. From here you will have setting options for everything to include the flash, white balance, scene modes, color effects, exposure, color enhancements, burst and timer. You also have the option to customize and choose which items appear in this sidebar.
Bottom line here, the Focal camera app clearly isn’t perfect just yet, but at the same time it should be stable enough to do a bit of playing around. With that, the Focal apk is available by way of the xda-developers forums.
Seems like this might be a bit late to the dance considering the 4.2.2 camera was pulled from the S4 Google play addition and released as an APK about 3 weeks ago. And it works on any device running 4.1 or better.
interesting enough, that one worked pretty well and i could use it flawlessly….but this one…i guess i been reading the notes on other sites and xda, and people are reporting many bugs and problems and also FCs, which makes me feel that i will wait till it is a bit more refined and then once i got a better more update phone (leaning toward waiting for a nexus 5), then i will go for CM and see how it goes.
This is cool on my GS4!
i have stock unrooted HTC Sensation android 4.0.3 sense 3.6
i have a “there is a problem parsing the package”
i tried installing the application thru ES File Explorer and thru Solid Explorer and no success in both. i tried trying to find information regarding this, but somehow what i got is that probably the file is not a match to my version and phone….perhaps i need to finally get to the point of the unending question “to root or not to root”
Android 4.1 or better which means Jellybean devices.
I got a rooted HTC Sensation XE, no regrets. Running CM 10.2 fine.
Focal is great by the way 😀