“On the other hand, stock JPEG processing on smartphones is often borderline horrible, specially from OEMs that have little to no imaging experience, so this could help on phones that tend to be let down by the built in processing rather than their hardware.”
Exactly. The prime example of this is the Note 4, which, otherwise, has an excellent camera. Its stock Camera app, however, is plain bad. It applies far too much noise reduction (NR for short) and oversharpening even when it’s absolutely unnecessary – for example, in broad daylight. Also, it has rather strong JPEG compression. (The latter, however, is much less an issue than the over-destructiveness of the NR and the sharpening). Unfortunately, you can’t in any way configure the NR / sharpening / JPEG compression parameters of the stock client.
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.