The smartphone camera arms race seems to be a little less intense these days, but the quality of a phone camera remains one of the major reasons people choose to upgrade – especially when most iPhone and Android devices have been basically the same black glass rectangle for a decade now.

But there's only so much circuitry and lens technology you can cram into a phone. So much of the development has been software level, with machine learning and AI doing heavy algorithmic work to make your photos pop. This ranges from automatic red eye removal and saturation adjustment all the way up to faked photos of the moon.

So we ask the bold question: where does smartphone photography go from here? And does it really matter if the photos your phone is taking don't really reflect reality?

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Phone Cameras: But like... what is a photo, man?