Comment by coldtea

>There is universal value in OIS, as everyone takes pictures while holding the device in his hands, yet OIS is not applied universally in all price-tiers of devices. The reason is COST.

The reason is digital stabilization is a good enough alternative to not bother, and the lens/sensor modules they use in bulk just didn't come with "analog" stabilization. And OIS is way less important than a future digitally verified photos feature could be (which could be mandated by corporations, banks, governments, insurance companies, for several uses when it becomes widespread), so they didn't bother to add it.

All kinds of cheapo smartphones still manage to have OIS, just because some Samsung models don't doesn't mean it's a universal argument for cheap phones in general.

>Nothing in this process changes with this Apple feature, because all it can do is confirm that the picture was taken by the camera as-is, but the attestation to the external metadata (WHO this is, WHAT this is, WHERE this is) still needs to be done by someone else. A party trusted enough to vouch for this.

Moot point, since the entity (e.g. gov) asking for an untampered photo (which this can do), can combine the photo with the metadata from the upload, like your gov mobile app account.