I worked on the camera in Instagram iOS for a while. There at least, there could be a 5,000ms latency delta between the “screen preview” and the actual full quality image asset from the camera DSP in the SOC.

I don’t know a thing about Android camera SDK but I can easily see how this choice was the right balance for performance and quality at the time on old hardware (I’m thinking 2013 or so).

Users didn’t want the full quality at all, they’d never zoom. Zero latency would be far more important for fueling the viral flywheel.

Things have improved since then, but as I understand it, the technical reason behind that is that it used to be that only the camera viewfinder API was universal between devices. Every manufacturer implemented their cameras differently, and so developers had to write per-model camera handling to take high quality photos and video.

One of the Valdi's authors here. It's using native views under the hood, like React Native, and there are 3 modes of compilation/execution for the TS source. It can be interpreted from JS (TS compiled to minified JS source), interpreted from JS bytecode (TS compiled to JS source, minified, then compiled to JS bytecode ahead of time), or compiled to native code directly (TS compiled to C ahead of time).

Now offering 4 swipe directions!