Deprecating react-native-camera

[sibelius]

react-native-camera RNCamera started as a "fork" of expo-camera, as it was hard to use any Expo modules outside Expo.

Right now things changed a lot, and we can easily use any expo module outside expo.

react-native-camera diverged a lot from expo-camera, and I think the only way to converge the implementation is to deprecate this package, and let people contribute the "missing" parts of react-native-camera to expo-camera

expo-camera also has support to web using react-native-web

add the following emojis to what do you think

👍 I'm in favor of deprecating this package
👎 I rather keep this package

[dnlsilva]

The name of the project is something very important for its maintenance.
If the expo camera continues to call expo camera, even though there is no need to use all things related to expo, as it contains the name expo and does not react native camera, users may want to not use it.
You search google for "react native camera" not "expo camera".

[brentvatne]

@GleidsonDaniel - i think this react-native-* naming is increasingly becoming less meaningful. a confusing issue for beginners is always clarifying that many libraries that don't being with the react-native-* prefix also work with their react-native apps, eg: formik, redux, mobx, etc. does react-native-* mean it supports ios, tvos, android, web, windows, and macos? no, it is some subset of that. so if the author of react-native-camera only wants to support ios and android, does that mean someone using windows and macos need to go create react-native-other-camera? would you be be able to find that on google or would you just go to the first result with the exact match? there are a lot of other issues with package discovery based off of including all of the keywords in the package name, it just doesn't scale, and so this is part of why we have been working on a package directory: https://reactnative.directory/?search=camera. it's recommended in the https://reactnative.dev docs and will eventually become a key piece of react-native developer workflow. this should solve the issue of discovering react-native packages based off of functionality.

even though there is no need to use all things related to expo

expo-* packages are react-native libraries that support ios, android, and web (perhaps more in the future, depending on what we decide to support). in my opinion, it's in the best interest of every developer in the ecosystem to find out for themselves sooner than later that they can use expo packages in their apps. i agree it's confusing to people due to historical baggage of expo being a monolith, it has some unfortunate additional installation steps the first time you install an expo-* package (we hope to get rid of these when converting to turbomodules), and it literally does not include react-native in the name. we could potentially rename to @expo/react-native-camera but it's not clear to me that this has a benefit beyond seo. maybe it's time for the react-native-* package name convention to die and people can just call things whatever they want and use a package directory to aid discoverability.

[ide]

One of the basic features of expo-camera is that it works with Expo. Naturally, Expo developers do search for "expo camera" and naming the package after the platform it's designed for communicates a lot of things accurately I think.

expo-camera also works with React Native. If we were to go down the path suggested in the first post, perhaps to communicate RN compatibility we could (1) make react-native-camera be a one-file package that imports and re-exports expo-camera and (2) improve the SEO of expo-camera for when people search for "react native camera".

[rthomazel]

It does make sense

sorry i clicked the close button by mistake.

[sibelius]

would expo-camera support windows? react-native-camera has windows support right now
would expo-camera support mlkit or something similar like this pull request #2931?

[brentvatne]

would expo-camera support windows?

we don't have any plans to support windows, so this may be a blocker.

that said, i think the ecosystem needs some solution for packages that provide an implementation for a given module for a different platform than those supported by the canonical package. eg: the react-native-camera windows implementation could live on the microsoft org. it seems that it would slow development down immensely if it was necessary to make changes synchronously for ios, android, web, windows, macos, tvos, and whatever comes next. it's certainly worth exploring what other options could be available here. i imagine as an author of a package that supports a bunch of platforms you've felt this pain @sibelius.

would expo-camera support mlkit or something similar like this pull request #2931?

we switched to mlkit over a year ago (for facedetector): expo/expo#4056

[fardad-dev]

I think we should not separate react-native and expo. It is best to add support for different platforms to react-native packages.
We can use react-native and react-native-web in any way other than expo like monorepo, and the expo does not give us a good sense.
Add platform support for react-native packages is the best choice.

[safaiyeh]

There is also Wix's react-native-camera-kit https://github.com/wix/react-native-camera-kit

They expressed some community help in a reddit thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactnative/comments/i1dsxx/what_react_native_componentsapis_do_you_feel_are/fzxq6j3?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

[cristianoccazinsp]

While I understand the hassle of maintaining two libraries, in my experience, I try to avoid expo modules as much as I can if the project is not expo-based. There's really no need to incur in the massive overhead and extra dependencies and install steps that are required to setup expo just to use one library. Also expo tends to keep behind RN updates, but that's just me.

In my case, I will probably stick to a react-native-camera fork until I have no other option to migrate to a new camera library.

[scarlac]

New react-native-camera-kit maintainer here: We are open to talking about options. However, I am not sure how a collaboration or merger would look like in reality.

[MSchmidt]

Having only one well maintained library sounds good but react-native-camera supports text recognition while expo-camera and react-native-camera-kit do not (yet). But maybe this could be extracted into an addon-package for different ML features.

[sibelius]

I think the current problem with Camera implementation is that they are doing too much

The API is too big, you can take a picture, you can record a video, you can do face recognition, you can do text recognition

We need a small core and related packages that extend the camera functionally on both native and js side

Tensorflow for react-native is a wrapper of expo camera https://js.tensorflow.org/api_react_native/0.2.1/