The iPhone 18 Pro’s ‘New’ Camera Trick Is Something Android Phones Did Years Ago

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A wider aperture, such as f/1.5, allows more light to reach the sensor and can also create a shallower depth of field. That gives you more natural separation between your subject and the background, rather than relying entirely on Portrait mode to create the blur afterward.

Now, if you switch the aperture towards, let's say, f/4.0, the opening becomes smaller. Less light gets in, but your depth of field increases, so more of the scene can stay sharp. That can be useful for a landscape, a group photo, or simply when you don't want the background disappearing into bokeh.

It sounds like something straight out of a dedicated camera, but Android phones have been playing around with it for a surprisingly long time. Essentially, making it function like a proper camera.

Android phones have been doing this for years

One of the earliest notable Android examples came from Samsung.

Before it reached the Galaxy S series, Samsung used an f/1.5 and f/2.4 variable aperture on the W2018 flip phone. This was a China-launched-only smartphone. The idea became much more familiar a few months later when Samsung brought its Dual Aperture system to the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus in 2018.

Their main cameras could physically switch between f/1.5 and f/2.4 depending on the situation. In darker conditions, the lens opened up to f/1.5 to collect more light. In brighter surroundings, it switched to f/2.4. You could even change between the two manually in Pro mode and physically see the aperture moving if you looked closely at the camera.

It was still a fairly basic implementation because you only had two aperture positions, but Samsung clearly saw enough value in the idea to keep it around. The Galaxy Note 9 followed with the same setup, and Samsung carried Dual Aperture into the Galaxy S10 series as well.

Huawei then took things quite a bit further with the Mate 50 Pro in 2022.

Instead of giving you only two positions, its 50MP main camera could move from f/1.4 to f/4.0, with 10 different physical aperture sizes available in Pro mode. The phone could adjust the aperture automatically too, but having that amount of manual control made it feel much closer to what you'd expect from a conventional camera.

That meant you weren't simply choosing between "more light" and "less light" anymore. You could use the aperture to change how much of the scene stayed in focus and how much natural background separation you wanted.

And then came Xiaomi.

The Xiaomi 13 Ultra already had the right ingredients for variable aperture to make a lot of sense. Its 50MP main camera used Sony's huge 1-inch IMX989 sensor, and Xiaomi paired that with a physical aperture that could switch between f/1.9 and f/4.0.

But I think Xiaomi really nailed the idea with the Xiaomi 14 Ultra.

Instead of sticking with the two-position system from the 13 Ultra, Xiaomi gave the 14 Ultra's 1-inch LYT-900 main camera a stepless variable aperture running from f/1.63 to f/4.0. There were six physical aperture blades inside, controlled by a high-precision actuator, so the camera wasn't simply jumping between two or four predefined apertures. It could adjust the opening throughout that range. That made the feature far more useful creatively.

At f/1.63, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra could make full use of that massive sensor by letting in more light while also giving you stronger natural background separation. Moving towards f/4.0 changed the look quite a bit, with more of the scene staying in focus - something that could come in handy for landscapes or group photos. Xiaomi also used those six physical aperture blades to create natural diffraction starbursts around bright lights, rather than faking the effect through software.

That is also why the Xiaomi 14 Ultra stands out so much in this conversation. Xiaomi had already experimented with a simpler two-step aperture system on the 13 Ultra, but instead of leaving it there, it refined the idea a year later with a much more flexible stepless setup. By the time the 14 Ultra arrived, variable aperture felt less like a camera gimmick and more like something you could actually use to change the way a photo was clicked.

So what is different on the iPhone 18 Pro?

The interesting part about the iPhone 18 Pro isn't that it finally has a variable aperture. It's how Apple chooses to use it. You get four fixed aperture positions between f/1.48 and f/4.0, which should make the feature easy to understand and, more importantly, easy to use without spending much time thinking about what the camera is doing.

But that simplicity also makes Xiaomi's approach to the 14 Ultra look even more ambitious in hindsight. Xiaomi gave you a genuinely stepless aperture across almost the same range, paired it with a huge 1-inch sensor, and treated it as something you could actually play around with rather than just another automatic camera adjustment. It gave photographers more room to decide how they wanted a shot to look.

And perhaps that's the more interesting takeaway here. The iPhone 18 Pro may end up making variable aperture far more familiar to everyday users, but Android manufacturers had already moved well past the experimental stage.