In the pre-smartphone days, if you wanted someone to take a picture of you in front of the Eiffel Tower or something, you first had to give them a little impromptu lesson on using your camera. An ambitious new iPhone update reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, but not yet confirmed by Apple, sounds like it would make the default camera app so customizable, it could bring that kind of befuddlement back to smartphone photography—but only if the phone’s owner chooses to set it up that way.
Gurman, whose reporting comes as always from anonymous sources, writes that the impending updates, “should appeal to professional users.”
The physical side button that brought up camera controls starting with the iPhone 16 invited users to get adventurous with the device’s more advanced features, and this app seems like the next step for the users who actually like that button. From the sound of it, the Camera app is going to become its own little ecosystem of sub-apps, called widgets, according to Bloomberg, which add new control options to “the top of the interface.”
It sounds as if advanced smartphone photographers get to make their Camera app truly their own, allowing them to have their favorite widgets ready all the time, to discard the widgets they don’t want to see, or to just leave the Camera app as-is.
Widgets, according to Gurman, will vary from function to function, and will live in an “Add Widgets” tray that can be brought up from the bottom of the interface. So for taking still photos, there will be widgets that control things like exposure and depth-of-field. Widgets come with what sound like euphemistic difficulty settings: “basic,” “manual,” and “settings.”
And you know that Controls button in the top-right corner of the Camera app that looks like a row of apps? Gurman says that’s being relocated to just to the right of the shutter button.
In addition to the new professional-grade features, Gurman writes that you’ll be able to toggle past modes like photo and video to a whole new mode called Siri mode. Apparently Siri mode can be used for things like translating text within the camera app, or pointing your phone at a flower and finding out what kind it is.
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