Can an Android phone scan a room, and which ones have the sensor

The short answer

Search this and page one hands you a list of bug detector apps, a GitHub project, a hobbyist 3D printing guide, and two real answers that are both written by companies selling the app they recommend. Nobody has written the plain version for somebody who has to put a price on the result.

The plain version is that scanning and measuring are two different claims. Plenty of Android phones can build a rough 3D impression of a room. Almost none of them have hardware that measures distance, and the difference matters the moment you quote fixed price work off the numbers.

Ten phones have the sensor and you cannot buy them

Google publishes the list of devices ARCore supports and flags which ones carry a time of flight hardware depth sensor. There are ten of them. Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, Note10+, Note10+ 5G, A80, S20+, S20+ 5G and S20 Ultra 5G. LG V60 ThinQ and V60 ThinQ 5G. Sharp AQUOS R5G.

Look at that list again. It stops at the S20 generation. Nothing newer from any manufacturer carries the flag, and not one Pixel is on it at all. Google does not say why the sensor disappeared from flagship phones and we are not going to guess, but as a practical matter a customer who bought a phone in the last four years almost certainly does not have one.

LiDAR is a separate thing and it is simply not there. Google list records no Android phone with a LiDAR scanner. On the Apple side the depth sensor has been in the Pro models since the iPhone 12 Pro, which is why the iPhone Pro keeps coming up in this conversation.

What ARCore depth actually is

So what is the other 88 percent doing. Google Depth API estimates distance from motion. It takes multiple images from different angles as the phone moves and compares them to work out how far away every pixel is, with machine learning filling in where the motion is small. On the ten phones that do have a sensor, it folds the sensor data in and gets better results, including when the phone is held still.

Read Google own caveats, because they are the useful part. Valid depth data only arrives once the user has started moving the device around. Surfaces with few or no features, such as white walls, will be associated with imprecise depth. Their stated working range is 0 to 65 meters with the best results between about half a meter and five meters.

Now picture the room you quote in. A freshly painted white bathroom, nothing on the walls, somebody holding a phone who has never done this before. That is the exact condition Google warns about, on the camera only path, in the smallest room in the house. Google publishes no accuracy figure for it, and that absence is the answer rather than an oversight.

What the scanning apps say about Android

You do not have to take our word for it, because the companies whose whole product is room scanning have already made this call.

magicplan supports Android phones that ARCore supports, and then says plainly that Android devices are not supported for its scan features, because of the absence of LiDAR. Android users get to pick a square room, define corners by hand, or import and draw. The automatic scan is an iPhone 12 Pro or newer and iPad Pro feature.

That is a company with every commercial reason to say yes, choosing to say no. When you see a tool claiming a full automatic room scan on any Android phone, that is the claim to go and test before you price anything off it.

What happens here when she is on an Android

We do not pretend the sensor is there. The link opens in whatever browser is already on her phone with nothing to install, and what it asks her for depends on what the phone can do.

On an Android it asks her to photograph the room and to type the room sizes in. The photos upload one at a time as she takes them, so a dropped connection halfway through does not cost her the lot. A vision model reads those photographs and a model writes the scope brief from them. Then the quantities get priced against your own cost book.

The thing to be clear about, and the reason this page exists, is that no measurement comes out of a photograph. Not here and not anywhere. The photos tell you what the job is, which is most of what you wanted. The sizes are the ones she typed with a tape in her hand, and the scope brief says so on its face, so you are never looking at a number without knowing where it came from.

That is usually enough to answer the only question you had, which is whether this job is worth a morning. For the ones that are, you drive out with the scope already written and a tape in your pocket.