I've noticed in the specs for the Pixel 7 Pro, the camera is supposedly 50 MP. When taking pictures with the GOS Camera, I'd get ~13 MP photos. Same with Open Camera. So then I figured maybe those didn't have the proper proprietary code to use the full capabilities of the camera, so I reluctantly enabled sandboxed Google Play and installed Google Camera. I was surprised when even that produced ~13 MP photos at "full" resolution.

Is this me misunderstanding an important distinction between the described resolution, and the actual functional resolution of the hardware itself? Is there some setting or configuration I'm missing? Are there proprietary blobs that need to be bundled into the OS for any of the three to take max resolution photos?

It’s my understanding that the pixels in the photo are “binned” by the software.

    Blastoidea reading up, that sounds like it describes exactly this situation. Thanks. For some reason none of my search terms turned up with "pixel binning" when I was trying to figure this out on my own. Glad to know it's not intentionally handicapped.