Android · Camera
A camera that corrupts its own image, live in the viewfinder.
Highlights
Real databending
Corrupts the actual camera bytes (YUV frames and the JPEG stream) rather than layering a filter that imitates the look.
Live in the viewfinder
You see the glitch as you frame the shot, so you can compose with it instead of discovering it afterwards.
Stable enough to use
Held at 360 to 720p and 20 to 30fps, so the corruption stays wild while the app does not.
Databending is the practice of opening an image file in something that was never meant to read it, like a text editor or an audio tool, and letting the damage become the picture. It produces glitches no filter reproduces convincingly, because they come from the file format actually breaking.
PhotoBend does that to a live camera feed.
Why bytes and not filters
A glitch filter paints an effect on top of a clean image. It always looks like a decision. Real corruption looks like an accident, because it is one. The artefacts follow the structure of the encoding, so they smear along macroblocks and shift colour planes the way genuinely damaged data does.
The trade-off is that corrupting a live stream can easily crash the decoder or produce a frame that takes too long to render. Most of the work in this app is keeping it stable at a usable frame rate while still letting the damage be real.
Where it is going
Android, in Kotlin and Compose, with the corruption engine kept deliberately separate from the camera pipeline so the two can be worked on without disturbing each other.