Why 2026 smartphones won’t have this game-changing camera tech

Modern smartphone cameras are impressive beasts, as many camera phones combine cutting-edge hardware with advanced image processing capabilities. Some of the more notable innovations in recent years include periscope cameras, 200MP sensors, and all-pixel autofocus.

However, one of my favorite hardware features arrived in 2022: one-inch camera sensors. Unfortunately, adoption of this tech has seemingly stalled in the last year or so, and it doesn’t look like we’ll see much of it in 2026. What went wrong?