Before we get started, here are some pre-requisites – You’ll need the Asus Zenfone Max Pro M2 itself (duh), a micro-USB cable, Google Camera APK which you can download here, and a PC with ADB and Fastboot installed which you can find here. Download the file and install it. To be clear, no root required.
Steps to Install Google Camera on ZenFone Max Pro M2
Once you get your hands on your shiny new Max Pro M2, you’ll need to head over to Settings > System > About Phone and tap on “Build Number” 7 times to enable Developer Options. Once you do so, head back to the previous menu and tap on Developer Options. Scroll down for a bit and enable “USB Debugging”. Once done, power off your smartphone.
Once the phone is turned off, press and hold the volume down button and the power button at the same time till you see the Asus logo and then release the buttons. A few seconds later, your phone will be in the recovery menu. In the recovery itself, scroll down to “Reboot to bootloader” using the volume down button and press the power button to select the option. Once you select it, you will be taken to the CSC Fastboot Mode which looks like this screen. Once you’re in the fastboot mode, connect your phone to your PC and launch a command window/PowerShell window by holding the “Shift” key and right-clicking on the ADB folder (wherever you have installed it on your PC) and selecting “Launch command/PowerShell window here”. You will now be greeted with a command window wherein you will need to type out a couple of instructions/commands. First, type in “fastboot devices” or “.\fastboot devices” on some computers and hit the enter key to which you should be able to see a string of numbers as the output, which signifies that your phone is connected to the PC.
Next, you have to enter the following command – “fastboot oem enable_camera_hal3 true” and hit the enter key. This command will enable support for camera2api on your phone which is a must in order to be able to use Google Camera.
You can now enter the command “fastboot reboot” in order to reboot your device. Once you reboot, install the Google Camera APK which you downloaded from the link above and voila, you now have Google Camera with Night Sight installed on your Asus Zenfone Max Pro M2. Google Camera considerable improves the quality of images including those shot in portrait mode, be it from the front or rear camera, and Night Sight as I said earlier, is just plain magical. Take a look at a few images taken with the stock camera and with Google Camera side by side to see the difference.
Hope you found this short tutorial useful, and if you have any queries, feel free to let us know and we’ll be glad to help you out. Happy snapping!
