Reply from support:
I actually have some more information to share about this. Here’s a quote from one of our developers:
There’s no standard way in Android to work with those high resolutions, wide angle camera etc. Regular Android apps (installed via Play etc) can only access standard feature sets of Android (Android SDK etc). Anything that’s not covered by the SDK is just not accessible for regular apps. Preinstalled system apps (like our own camera app) can have access to everything we give them access to, including device-specific custom camera features.
Just to clarify: wide-angle support, high-resolution and other such features are not “exotic” or unique to Fairphone. But Android just doesn’t provide a standard way to implement them. There are ways to make some such features accessible to 3rd-party apps (AndroidX, camera extensions), but that’s not done on FP3 and FP4, and is not a trivial topic at all.
The problem is well-understood, but not as easy to resolve as it seems. For now we are focusing our efforts on more impactful issues like those related to calls and data connectivity, or smaller issues which aren’t as time-consuming. In the meantime, the request to implement the Camera2 API is kept on hold but the team will come back to it when they have the resources to spare.
Well, I guess the multi-camera API, which is available since Android 9, is a unicorn then. *sigh* I’ve already replied back, but I guess we won’t see any significant progress in the foreseeable future.