Help us test your phone’s camera.

The Samsung Galaxy S24+ and S26+ have a camera autofocus behaviour that’s unreliable from within third-party applications, especially at document range. Samsung’s own Camera app handles it correctly; every other app doesn’t.

The main rear lens on these phones has a minimum focus distance that’s longer than the distance at which you naturally hold a document. Below that, the lens physically cannot produce a sharp image — it’s a glass-and-sensor geometry thing, not a software bug.

Samsung works around this in their own app with a feature called Focus Enhancer: when you move close to a subject, it silently switches from the main lens to the ultrawide lens, which has a much shorter minimum focus distance. You see a small flower icon pop up when it engages.

Focus Enhancer is proprietary to Samsung’s Camera app. It is not exposed through Android’s Camera2 or CameraX APIs. Every third-party app — web, Capacitor, React Native, Flutter, native Kotlin — goes through those public APIs, which means no framework rewrite resolves this on its own. The constraint sits below the API layer that every framework depends on.

The fix, applied at the app level

1. Open the ultrawide lens directly for close-range captures.
2. Use explicit tap-to-focus instead of continuous autofocus.
3. Lock focus the moment it acquires, so the camera doesn’t re-hunt.

The three-step fix has to be tuned per device. Every Samsung exposes its lenses slightly differently — some show the ultrawide as a separate lens, some hide it behind a sub-1.0× zoom. That’s what the test on the next screen helps us figure out.

Wider user reports

• Square (point-of-sale): blurred ID capture on S24+.
• Banking apps: blurred cheque capture on S24+.
• S23+ users report the same pattern; community workaround is “use the native Samsung Camera”.

The pattern is consistent: Samsung’s own camera works; third-party apps don’t; the only recommended workaround routes through a Samsung-only feature.

Put a real document on a well-lit table — ID card, prescription label, or a page of printed text. Hold the phone the way you’d normally scan, around 15–25 cm above it. That’s the distance where the S24+/S26+ main lens fails; it’s the distance we care about.

The camera screen at a glance

• Lens pills (top): one per camera your browser can reach. Flower icon 🌸 on likely ultrawide lenses. Tap to switch.
• AF toggle: continuous autofocus on or off.
• Tap toggle: when on, tapping the preview focuses at the tap point.
• Lock toggle: pins focus distance once acquired.
• Torch toggle: phone flashlight.
• Blur score (top): higher is sharper. Over 80 = usable; under 30 = blurry.

What to try

For each lens, try a few combinations: (a) just continuous AF, (b) tap-to-focus with AF off, (c) tap-to-focus with lock on. Capture a frame each time. Note which lens + combination gives you the best blur score on a document. The app logs everything automatically; you just need to remember the winning combination.

When you find one that works — or if nothing does — hit Leave feedbackand tell us. That’s the whole test.