Phone Camera
I love photography.
In fact, I have a small collection of film cameras I've picked up in thrift stores here and there as well as a 1st generation Sony α7s that I have used for video and astrophotography. I even have a bag full of expired film rolls that I'm working my way through, willing to spend quite a bit of money getting them developed to see if any of them are still good.
But I only cary those around when I know I'll be going to a place that might be good for photography- my phone, on the other hand, is always with me. But my phone has been developing an awful habit of introducing AI without also giving the ability to turn that "feature" off unless I use a 3rd party app.
Being a fan of film cameras and the relatively noisy 12MP α7s, I've grown accustomed to the light dusting of noise in shadows, but my phone tries its hardest to prevent noise at all costs. I've even noticed lately that an extra step of the processing includes adding texture to these smeared shadowy areas, which feels incredibly fake and plastic to me.
So I hunted for a 3rd party app that felt right. It honestly didn't need too many bells and whistles, and honestly, anything to avoid yet another subscription service would be ideal, though in this day and age, it's nearly unavoidable.
mood.camera
Image from mood.camera's website
This is the first app I tried after getting home after a night walk and being confused why my night photographs looked so weird. I saw that it was a film emulation-forward app that tries to capture the feel of shooting on film. It manages to do this pretty well! There are some presets that add a strong (and unadjustable) halation effect, which I generally like the idea of, though the execution really made less than ideal photos since there's not a live preview of the effect.
As far as price goes, there is a free 7 day trial before having to pay $1.99/month or $14.99/lifetime. I bought the lifetime pass because it is a fun little thing. I used this camera for a while before deciding to get another, different flavor of default camera alternative to the mix to use in parallel with mood.camera.
Halide Mark II Pro Camera
Image by deleted account on Reddit
And this was it. This was the "no filters, no AI, RAW, fancy schmancy photographer focused" app. It's honestly great. Other than some hangups where it takes a while to launch (which is honestly a running theme among all 3rd party camera apps), this is the one I think is best for getting great photography out of. It produces gorgeous grain without banding, it lets me further process the photo in other apps if I need to, and it's incredibly customizable in almost every way I'd want it to be.
But I needed less of a surgical tool and more of a fun toy. mood.camera was to be replaced by something offering something similar.
(Not Boring) Camera
https://notbor.ing/product/camera
Image by New_Effort7466 on Reddit
This is my toy camera. The app itself is customizable in that you can change the color of the buttons and the filters are generally pretty nice. I use this for photos that I don't want to have to bring into another app and process. Selfies, small memories that I'll never intend to put in a picture frame, a million pictures of my dog. This camera does those things perfectly and is fun while doing it. Even the sounds it makes while using it gives off a satisfying feedback to the button pressed or switch flicked. The only issue I can think of with this app is that there's no lifetime option available. It's either $7.99/month or $14.99/year, which is quite a bummer for my long-term use of this app.
I'm aware that Leica has a subscription-only app available as well, but after seeing that the yearly subscription fee for the full app is $69.99 with no option for a lifetime subscription, I have avoided falling in love with it or really even trying it out that much.
Conclusion
So I've essentially replaced my camera app with 2 alternative apps (while still using my native camera app for video). Sometimes I think I make things more complicated for myself on purpose, but then I realize that I'm nothing if not a very fussy person at my core. If I do decide to eventually change the camera apps I prefer, I'll make sure to update this page.