The owners of Google Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G have lost the ability to use their phone’s astrophotography feature with their ultra-wide lens after a software update that disabled the combination.
While capturing ultra-wide stars was considered an important feature at launch, the Google 8.1 Camera update removed the feature in November, and users only noticed it recently. Google itself remained silent about the change, except for the update of a single support page.
Even so, this page does not explicitly specify that the feature has been removed, only that “On Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5, astrophotography only works with zoom settings equal to or greater than 1x.” Previously, you could select 0.6 x zoom to switch from the main sensor to the ultra-wide lens when using astrophotography mode.
In other words, you can still use astrophotography on your Pixel 5 or Pixel 4a 5G, and you can still use the ultra-wide lens – but not together. It’s a surprising move, considering that Google announced the addition of ultra-wide lenses when the two phones were revealed, including its app for astrophotography.
That said, some users have complained – including on Google’s support forums – of an ugly green tone that appears when photographing stars with the ultra-large lens. It is possible that Google simply deactivated the combination due to this lack of quality, either temporarily until a fix is found or permanently, if the failure is intrinsic to the hardware.
Either way, it’s a shame, not just because the Google 8.1 Camera update also brought a lot of useful features to older Pixel phones, but because Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a owners now have a less capable smartphone than the one they bought originally.
Still, if the removal only became widely known more than a month after it happened, it is probably one of the least used features on these two devices – then Google could have seen ultra-wide astrophotography as an acceptable loss.