Most phone image sensors have very few hardware functions broken out to the SOC processor. It is nothing like a DSLR that is designed around the sensor. Phones are primarily radios, batteries and aesthetic motivations to justify their always on stalkerware. Image sensors require a ton of extremely high speed parallel interfaces to breakout things like RAW images in real time. They get super hot and require advanced design considerations. In phones, the processing is largely done in the image sensor module with the output being a much simpler data stream. This data stream is usually the only handles that are coded into the kernel module for the hardware.

I learned this stuff when screwing around with DIY optics, old streaming cameras and some old phone cameras. The primary Linux system used is V4L2. I was most interested in finding any ways to control the exposure time for much longer durations, but it turns out that this setting is not often broken out on these types of small sensors.

So a lot of the features on this kind of app are emulated in software. It is not like a real DSLR where features are more closely correlated with the sensor’s capabilities. That said, a lot can be done in software.