open-sourceJul 2026Solo developer
BeautyCam
An open-source Android beauty-camera app built with Jetpack Compose and CameraX — real-time preview and capture pipeline, shipped as a tagged release rather than a repo.
KotlinJetpack ComposeCameraXAndroid
Overview
A beauty-camera app for Android, built to learn the CameraX pipeline properly rather than to clone an existing product. Source and a release APK are on GitHub.
What it involved
- CameraX for the real-time preview and capture pipeline — lifecycle binding, use-case configuration, and handling the fact that camera hardware is not a pure function.
- Jetpack Compose for a declarative UI over an inherently stateful, side-effect-heavy subsystem.
- A tagged GitHub release with a built APK, because "it's on GitHub" and "someone can install it" are different claims.
What was actually hard
Camera work punishes the assumption that the device will cooperate. Permissions can be revoked mid-session, the surface can be torn down on rotation or backgrounding, and available resolutions differ per device. Compose's declarative model is a good fit for describing what the UI is, but binding it to a camera lifecycle means being deliberate about what survives recomposition and what must not.