I’m a junior developer who recently started Android development. I want to use an external USB camera (UVC camera) in my Android project but I’m not sure how to approach this.
From the Android documentation, it seems like the Camera2 API supports external cameras, but I couldn’t find any concrete examples or detailed steps to get started. I also explored using libraries like libusb and libuvc, but aside from adding implementation dependencies in the gradle file, I don’t know how to properly integrate these libraries into my project.
It seems like the most reliable way is to build these libraries myself and include the .so files in the project, but unfortunately, I don’t have enough time to dig deep into this process right now.
If anyone has experience working with external USB cameras on Android or has tackled a similar issue, I’d really appreciate your advice or pointers. Thanks in advance!
Supporting USB webcams is an optional feature for device manufacturers, and most phone makers do not enable that feature. That means that in most cases, webcams plugged into a phone will not be visible via Android's camera APIs. Note that quite a few Android TV devices do support webcams, though that may not be very helpful for your use case.
As a result, most apps that want to support webcams use Android's USB APIs instead, basically building UVC device support inside their own code. That's what libusb/libuvc aim to do, for example, though not sure they officially support Android. I do see some codebases like UVCCamera that use them to implement an Android app. No idea which might be a good example to look at, if any.