Get Androids PhotoSphere on any JellyBean device

The Samsung Galaxy S4, the HTC one, and a number of other well selling Android devices are great but when their manufacturers use a custom version of Android (such as Samsungs Touch Wiz) they often also replace the standard camera app from Google with a modified version of their own.

This is not always a bad thing, the camera app on Samsungs flagship S4 for example is superior in many ways to the stock Android one it replaces, but Google introduced one thing with version 4.2 of their operating system (better known as JellyBean) that has photography fans eager to use it...and it's the one feature that, until now, many of us have been unable to use because it isn't included in most manufacturers replacement camera applications.

That feature is Googles photosphere.

Googles camera app lets you take a 360 degree panorama and then, when you want to view it, you can move around it as if you were there inside the picture.


It's a handy tool but it has a few issues, mainly that it cannot remove moving objects from the image (so you may get the same people multiple times in your image if they were walking by at the time) and it works best with subjects that are a reasonable distance from the camera, but as this is intended for 360 landscape panoramas these things are unlikely to be a major issue for most people.

So how do we get it on our Androids? Well as long as you are using a phone or tablet that runs Android version 4.2 or higher you can simply click this link. This will open a web page with a download button on it, that links to the Samsung Galaxy S4 Play Edition photosphere application.

Click the download button and, when the download is completed, simply install the apk file you just downloaded (you will need to make sure that the "allow unknown sources" option in your devices settings menu is ticked before you can install any apps from outside of the Play Store).

This will install the gallery and photosphere camera applications, it will not over write your existing camera or gallery apps and will work on any Jellybean device (even if that device is rooted). To take a photosphere just open the new camera app and you'll see the sphere icon on screen.

Just press the sphere and then start taking your pic by clicking the big blue circle. It's that easy.

To view the spheres you take you will need to use the new gallery you installed, this will recognise them as a photosphere. View them in your default gallery and they will be displayed as normal panoramas.

So download and have fun taking photospheres.