@ikoz this is freaking stupid.
Everyone have old , like 2015 smartphone, which can very easily do ip camera work,and much more.
But you can't use it due to bad laws.

Instead you ought to buy raspberry pi, buy camera module, find suitable battery, it's like 5-10 times more, than this smartphone's price.
And time to assemble it all.

You could simply use discharged phone, save $200 right on the spot.

Laws, regulation and enforcement are needed to fix it.
Government should help free market because free market can't fix itself.

@ikoz only politicians can force businesses like apple to make their products usable beyond their eol, for instance, Iphone S5 with touch screen and battery is far better than raspberry pi 3 and even 4,
If some laws would force manufacturers to publish drivers for post market devices, billions of these phones could work as , for instance, home security cameras, absolutely for free, without competition to manufacturers' offerings.

I would prefer to run linux on iphone 5s , would pay for it, instead of using pinephone of any model.
They could even make it unusable as a phone for calls, let use it's other capacities.

These devices are totally wasted. Some laws can let to utilize them even not as phones, but simply as smart devices.

Laws are needed, businesses do not care about this tremendous waste, politicians should.

@ikoz said in How to use camera via terminal v4l on Pixel 3A:

@foxx said in How to use camera via terminal v4l on Pixel 3A:

Probably government could oblige manufacturers to provide drivers , which should comply with some POSIX

People don't understand any of these. Politicians not only don't care about privacy, standards etc, but are busy pushing those stupid laws forbidding end-to-end encryption, I wouldn't expect anything from them.

The world is far from perfect and it will always be like that, so you have to make compromises.

It depends how you look at it.
Europe does not make any money on this market, the US and China does, so European politicians would be interested in such laws to protect their sovereignty.
So, people can count on politicians, they listen for interesting initiatives very carefully.

European businesses, such as Fairphone , and world community would benefit from such laws.

If there were no Netscape litigation, which is based on Political incentives and laws, iPhone would be called Windows Mobile now.

@ikoz. Well, it addresses the post market android devices, but manufacturers still have no interest to support it whatsoever.
Somehow it would be nice for linux to support mobile devices too, all these billions of old phones could be used , if linux supports them without HAL, hardware android layer.

Canonical tried to push Unity using pretty useless Ubuntu Touch, when actual problem was on hardware manufacturers' incentives layer to make unified drivers, so some organization could make actual linux, not gnomes and package managers without underlying layer.

If there are drivers, and kernel, people could assemble there own display and package managers on top of it.

Android is the Linux for mobile devices, except it's owned by Google, which might be a good thing.
Making Android independent from Google probably would facilitate its development, so, this would be Microsoft Windows for smartphones, and deliver unified experience.

There is no way to reuse obsolete, not supported smartphones, Google and manufacturers are more interested to force customers to buy new devices every couple of years.
Throwing Capacity of all these phones away is a huge waste, nobody would feel they need raspberries, if their old phones would support linux, because in this way these phones would become free pis with huge bonus of touch screen and battery.

Probably government could oblige manufacturers to provide drivers , which should comply with some POSIX standards for smartphones and tablets in order to be allowed to sell to the public, so, people could reuse them as personal smart home /web servers by community effort, so, manufacturers also could recoup their investment, and good phones are not thrown away, polluting environment, all these old phones could be assigned for home chores , if there are law, drivers, kernels developers, drivers developers and community behind them.

Linux complies with POSIX, there is a need for such compliance for smartphone and tablet pcs market.
As with USB C, some laws could also be introduced and enforced in this regard.

Any thoughts?

@ikoz thank you, I have already seen this 6 years old post and thought something have changed since then.

Camera is a proprietary device in itself, it's up to manufacturer to support it.
All this android HAL could be bypassed altogether, if manufacturers of devices are interested.

The problem of linux phone is not lack of apps, the problem is no advantages over android/iPhone due to relying on HAL, termux works on both better, than on Ubuntu Touch, let alone other apps.

There is no addressable market here.
Hate to write it, but Ubuntu Touch either tries to solve a problem that doesn't exist, or do it in a wrong way.

Something is missing here.

I have purchased recently Google Pixel 3a with hope that running Ubuntu Touch on this device will let to access camera via terminal.
To me the whole point of linux phone was terminal, and it looks obvious. Linux was started in attempt to make terminal to university computer work.

Camera app both front and back camera works, thogh, it doesn't let to choose capture without flash light.

Terminal command ls shows
/dev/video32
/dev/video33,
but I couldn't find any documentation on how to manage camera via terminal, which, I hate to write it, looks inferior to termux, though, it's expected.

Could you please tell, provide links to documentation on how to access camera via terminal, or how to make this function work, i. e. program it, if it doesn't exist?

Probably someone could maintain camera / video subsystem for Ubuntu Touch and even commit something back to the Linux Kernel, so this featurecan be reused in other distribution, ndon't you think?

Thank you for your reply.