An overview of the best free and paid camera apps
Third-party camera apps add additional functionality to your computer or phone’s native camera app, from helping you record professional-grade podcast audio and video to turning your smartphone camera into a manual SLR-style shooter. We’ve picked out some of our favorite apps based on their functionality, editing tools, level of access to camera settings, and more.
Best camera apps by purpose
Some third-party camera apps are better for work, while others are geared toward creativity and fun. Yes, the stock camera app on your iPhone or Android can technically do it all—but these purpose-specific camera apps will give you better results.
For work meetings
A good webcam can make all the difference when you want to have a professional, polished appearance on business calls—but you don’t need a separate, single-purpose camera anymore. Camo lets you turn any iPhone into a professional webcam for Mac and Windows computers, even if your devices don’t support Apple’s Continuity Camera.
For point-and-shoot photography
If you’re into photography but are less excited about hauling your DSLR everywhere, Halide Mark II is the perfect companion for your phone camera. It gives you fully manual controls when shooting on an iPhone, including adjusting the ISO, white balance, and shutter speed. We like that the app makes it simple to shoot in RAW format, opening up great possibilities for professional editing once you’re done shooting. The app can even handle RAW and HDR shooting modes at the same time, so you have flexibility when it comes time to edit.
If smartphone photography makes you miss the feel of adjusting a physical lens, check out Alice Camera. It’s a combination of hardware, software, and AI stabilization that lets you shoot photos using real, full-size pro camera lenses that mount onto the back of your phone. We haven’t seen anything quite like Alice yet; it’s definitely one to watch (if you’re open to purchasing some new hardware, that is).
And when you want something that’s quick and easy to use—but still better than the iPhone’s stock camera app—Focos works nicely. It lets you tweak your phone photos as you take them, including adjusting the aperture, adding or removing light sources, and even moving the focal point in portrait mode. While it doesn’t offer quite the same level of real-time manual focus that Halide does, it’s still a fun addition to your on-the-fly shooting and photo editing workflow.
Finally, when you want to do one specific thing really well, look for a specialized camera app. For example, if you’re into shooting long exposures (great for astrophotography), try Spectre Camera. It uses AI to speed up the process of taking beautifully smooth long exposure photos on the iPhone—even going as far to automatically remove crowds of people or congested traffic during daylight shots. Its machine learning algorithms do a great job at low-light night photos, turning streetscapes into streaming lines of color.
For social media content creation
When you need to create high-quality, social-media-friendly content on the go, CapCut is the answer. You can bounce between its desktop and mobile app, and the software contains a slew of useful features for capturing, editing, and enhancing video. One of our favorite features is its AI-enhanced clip maker that automatically cuts your longer-form videos down into short snippets for social.
If you’re running an event and want to get photos from your guests, encourage everyone to download Lense. It’s billed as a “digital disposable camera,” and brings back some restrictions that now feel like throwback film camera fun: each gets a limited number of “exposures” and the photos don’t show up until after the event is over. Every guest’s photos go into a shared album, so you can grab the ones you like best and share them across social media.
For professional video recording and editing
If Final Cut Pro has been a staple of your video editing workflow, it’s worth giving the new Final Cut Camera a look. Like Halide, it unlocks manual camera controls on the iPhone—but enables you to connect four devices at once. This makes Final Cut Camera our top choice for granular control when you need to capture your main footage, B-roll, and more all at once.
If you don’t need to link up multiple cameras or prefer not to edit in Final Cut Pro, give Darkroom a try. It’s technically a photo editing app, not a standalone camera, but we think it’s a nice addition to any videographer’s (or photographer’s) on-the-go camera setup. You can edit 4k video on your phone, work with RAW files, add watermarks, tweak your lighting, and export videos into multiple formats. It has presets, too, that’ll speed up your work—especially if you’re used to Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop.
For podcasting
AI is making it easier than ever to produce a great podcast with minimal equipment. If you’re going to be filming yourself and your guests on computers, Riverside.fm is a user-friendly tool that works with whatever hardware each participant has at their disposal. Rather than asking everyone to film their own video (and hope that it works) or use a low-quality capture from Zoom, Riverside lets you collect high quality audio and video from everyone’s devices. Yes, you’re still limited by the quality of guests’ camera hardware and microphones, but when you capture footage with Riverside you get the best possible audio and image quality—and get some nice control over how the session is run, too.
If you plan to record your podcast on the go, or know that everyone will be calling in from their iPhone, then Detail is the way to go. Like Riverside, it lets you capture footage using the rear or selfie camera on more than one device. In this case, it connects two iPhone cameras together. As the podcast host, you can control your guest’s microphone audio levels, camera layouts, backgrounds, and more. There are nice editing controls included in the iOS app, too, or you can use AI to automatically cut and splice your footage based on the transcript.
The future of iPhone and Android camera apps
We’re already seeing AI become a bigger feature in a number of the camera apps on this list, and we expect that trend to continue in the future. AI is also increasingly present in stock camera apps, including those on Google Pixel and Samsung Android devices. That said, there’s still going to be a market for third-party camera apps going forward—check out some more of our favorite purpose-built apps for fun shots, professional photos, time-lapse videos, and more below: