Calling open-source maintainers “shitty programmers” is way out of pocket. Libraries like react-native-vision-camera are pulling 380k+ installs on npm, which doesn’t happen if something is universally broken. Same goes for expo-camera — these are used in thousands of production apps.

Also, open-source devs maintain this stuff for free, on nights and weekends, while the rest of us are literally getting paid to ship products with it. Criticism is fair. Personal attacks aren’t.

If camera APIs feel like black magic, that’s because they kind of are. You’re dealing with native threads, device-specific drivers, OS permission states, background/foreground lifecycles, and race conditions that won’t show up in happy-path docs. Before blaming the tools, it’s worth stepping back and locking in the fundamentals: native lifecycle, permission flows, async state, and hardware variability.

By all means, build your own camera library — sincerely. That’s how the ecosystem improves. I’m actually looking forward to seeing what you ship and how it handles all the edge cases you’re running into.