[ElCheapo]

Your post is only partially correct. Even with completely open firmware, or at least a documented interface, the biggest roadblock would become be abysmal state of OSS digital image processing. Engineers at major smartphone and camera companies are paid top dollar to improve how the images are processed, this is no laughing matter and is obvious when you compare the image quality from a no-name chinese brand with Samsung or Apple even though they are using the same exact sensors.

FOSS smartphones such as the Pinephone would then need a whole bunch of accelerators to perform such computations because the general purpose CPU would be too slow for that, and image could take seconds to finish processing and get saved in the gallery. But at that point Pinephone itself would not have enough expertise for such a design and everything would crumble.

[marcodiego]

> is obvious when you compare the image quality from a no-name chinese brand with Samsung or Apple even though they are using the same exact sensors.

This is an area where FLOSS has an opportunity to shine. I think many of these algorithms are described in scientific papers and considering FLOSS is much more collaboration-prone, I'd really expect the best algorithms (except for the ones that require much training data) to soon be implemented. An example of a success case: AV1.

[ElCheapo]

and who's designing and manufacturing and programming the accelerators needed for those algorithms to perform close to real time?

[rkalla]

... to add to your point, then take companies like Google who rely heavily on ML to improve the quality of the photos further and the distance between "RAW data off sensor" and "the best Samsung/Apple/Google can generate" is a HUGE gap.