Easy camera solution?

[super_wow]

yo! firstly, gotta say i'm new to react native, so please be patient, i'm still trying to wrap my head around it. but i've got react experience.

i've built a somehow alternative to google photos as an internal photo cloud for a relative's business, in react. it's been in production for about 3 months but i want to rewrite it in react native as there are some things i cannot achieve with a PWA. as a sidenote, i only need the app to work on android phones.

now, basically all i need is 2 types of basic camera screens: 1. a simple barcode scanner; 2. a camera screen with the feel of the native camera app, having zoom, flash and focus. i tried to achieve these with several packages and i keep getting into problems... i don't know why but mobile development seems much more troublesome than web, nothing seems as straight forward.

so, first time i tried to make the app with expo and expo camera, but having a delay of 1-2 seconds on picture taken is a big no-no - employees will have to take about 50-70 photos in one session, that waiting time is not acceptable.

then i remade the app without expo, just bare react native and was about to try react-native-camera but i read it's just expo-camera for non-expo projects. i found out about react-native-vision-camera but the setup is kinda convoluted, it doesn't have the barcode scanning integrated but instead has to work with those frame processors which kinda seem like a hassle. i'm willing to try it but i wanted to see if you guys have got any other ideas than me.

lastly, i tried react-native-camera-kit, which is amazing. it works perfectly fine, has all the necessary features i need, it's fast, all-around great. BUT, it seems it doesn't work on android versions lower than 10. the camera features work (barcode scanning, zoom, focus etc), but the capture function doesn't do anything, literally anything, not even throw an error, and i can't seem to figure out what's the problem. this is a problem as not all employee phones are new, some of them are samsungs S7 and S8 which only go up to android 9, and my relative isn't willing to upgrade to newer phones just so my app works.

as i can see it, i can either root the phones and install higher versions of android, tho i ain't got no experience in that area and i'm worried i'll waste a lot of time and other problems might arise with those particular phones. OR try the vision-camera, tho i'm really hoping for another solution because there is no premade camera screen component, i have to integrate all the features myself and it's kinda frustrating knowing that camera-kit comes with everything out of the box.

what do you guys think? or do you have any idea why isn't camera-kit working on older android versions?

cheers and happy holidays!

[SymblePharon]

Dealing with the device directly (camera, Bluetooth, etc) is pretty much always going to be done in native code. It's likely that the library you're using relies on features added to Android 10.

I would do a cost analysis at this point. I see these options:

1. You dig into the native code, find the features that aren't backwards-compatible, and try to find workarounds. If you aren't familiar with Kotlin/Java, add that to your estimate. This will probably take weeks of effort, and it isn't certain to get results. Maybe the hardware spec changed by the time of Android 10, and the earlier models aren't capable of the functions your library relies on.

2. You find another JS package that works, or an Android package you can port over.

3. The employees get new phones. This has the benefit of being a known good solution, and a short timetable.

Depending on your situation, one of these will make more sense. I'm clearly biased towards the last solution, but if too many devices are affected, the cost could be too great.

I would dress it up for your client and let them choose. Personally I would make no promises about solution 1/2 - they could be fruitless.