why can't you disable graphene's camera?

it's a system app and other apps rely on it for their own camera related features. If it was disabled there may be unexpected crashes and other stuff that u don't generally want.

mobos what is your threat model here? Being open source and from the GOS developers, I hardly think the camera app is one of your problems or that removing it would solve your problem with it. Maybe disabling camera access system-wide is what you need. For more critical threat models that include threat actors getting access to your OS, you'd need to tape or physically remove the camera modules.

If you simply prefer another camera app for taking photos, you might just ignore the system camera app, hide it from your custom launcher and restrict battery usage. But like @collector said, it's a system app that you don't want removed because it can cause issues.

"Camera app provides the system media intents used by other apps to capture images / record videos via the OS provided camera implementation. These intents can only be provided by a system app since Android 11."

https://grapheneos.org/usage#camera

brn Any app relying on system capture intents is broken. It just sounds like you're using no app that uses that. It is definitely a broken setup, though.

matchboxbananasynergy I don't doubt it, that's why I said YMMV! I don't use many apps, but popular ones like Signal and WhatsApp have the camera working without issues.

brn Any app launching the media capture intents will fail to launch them and potentially crash.

brn These apps are requesting the camera and microphone permissions instead of allowing you to capture images and video without them. Apps using the media capture intents don't require those.

pfr There's nothing odd about it being required by other apps. That's how Android works. Apps are meant to use the media capture intents to use the system camera app to have the user capture images and videos for them instead of unnecessarily requesting invasive camera and microphone access while the app is in use.

And in many cases, other apps simply look for any app named "camera" so they will happily use the Pixel camera if installed.

No, this is completely wrong. The media capture intents can only be provided by system camera apps. Apps are not looking for camera apps to capture images and videos this way.

I generally don't give other apps camera access anyway. If I want to send a picture on Signal, I'll take a photo with my camera app and then just add it to a chat as an attachment.

The whole point of the media capture intents is not needing to give apps camera and microphone access. The whole point is that the app launches the system camera app on top of itself and you can take a picture or video with that if you want based on the app requesting it instead of granting it access. This is a very privacy friendly standard Android design that's used for the file picker, photo/video picker, contact picker and media capture intents (photo and video capture) among other things. It's not a good thing when apps require permissions instead of these things. We had to make our Contact Scopes and Storage Scopes features to work around apps not doing things in the privacy friendly way via intents. We plan to make similar features for Camera and Microphone but we'd barely need it if apps just used the media capture intents when possible.