I’m sticking with the iPhone 17 Pro, since this Android champion is great by day but bad at night

I’m stunned by what both the best Android phones and iOS devices can accomplish in terms of camera performance in 2026.

Great photographers can take great photos even with a potato in their hands, but for better or worse, 99.9% of us aren’t Herb Ritts or Garry Winogrand, to quote a few names.

We, the mere mortals, need something extra to compensate for our photography shortcomings and this “something” usually is great cameras. High dynamic range, pin-sharp details, millions of pixels worth of resolution, rich tones and, above all, Auto exposure, Auto settings, Auto profiles, Auto HDR.You know what? The Auto mode can be great, too. There’s something about the whole point-and-shoot experience that captivates old and young, left and right all over the world.

Setting up your lights in a studio, having a professional makeup artist and model, working with backgrounds and super expensive interchangeable lenses and cameras… that’s great. But being able to capture a fleeting moment with the candy bar-sized gadget in your pocket is super satisfying, too.

Otherwise, brands wouldn’t try so desperately to offer us better and better cameras every year – one of the few smartphone fronts that still hasn’t totally plateaued and we see real innovation.Thankfully, these brands have mostly succeeded in their attempt to push the mobile camera envelope.

I like the taste of Chinese cameras

I’m no slave to any particular phone brand, as there is no such thing as “the perfect camera phone”. I’m a fan of Samsung’s consistent Galaxy S Ultra results with its main sensor in daylight; I bow before Apple’s selfie game on the iPhones… but I also experiment with what the vast majority of people would call “obscure brands”.

Of course, PhoneArena readers know these brands very well – I’m talking about Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, Huawei, Honor, OnePlus.