Do different Android Camera Apps make any difference?

You'll have to excuse me because I am most certainly out of my element in this forum.

My wife an I not not photographers, but we're parents so we take a lot of pictures with our phones. We are not looking for framed art just collecting memories. The subject in these pictures is a 2 year old who doesn't stop moving from the time he wakes up until the time he falls asleep, so good pictures are few and far between, but we like to put a couple in Dropbox every week to share with relatives.

Both of us have Galaxey S5 phones, but a S7 upgrade my be in our future after the holidays. Would we be better off with a non stock camera app to eek out any better pictures, or are we pretty much limited by the hardware of the phones?

You can try some other apps but I imagine you have some trouble catching the exact moment you want and I don't think there are any other camera apps that will make that a whole lot better.

Best way to go, or I find anyway, Auto with 100 ISO (in settings), for the kids and such. Or the 'Rich Tone' mode for anything that can be still for at least 3 seconds. I assume your settings are the same as mine as I'm on a Galaxy Note.

Also, keep your eye out at dollar stores for a battery powered shutter button, they work brilliantly!

For basic photography, the stock app is generally best - and the S7 has a fantastic camera that'll knock your socks off compared to the 2-3 year old stuff you're using now.

For art/landscape type photography, I've been using an app called 645Pro. I'm pretty sure they have released a version of it on Android now, but I'm not sure. It lets you do things like you would do on a "real" camera, and also lets you save out pictures in a lossless TIFF format. It has a lot of other neat features, that are great for landscapes, like a way to simulate a graduated ND filter so you don't blow out your skies.

For basic snapshots of the family and things like that, I use the default camera app.

I try to avoid using apps for editing, but this may be useful for sharing among family. Canon have an app called Lifecake, specifically for capturing the little ones as they grow.

I'm no expert in photography either, but I wasn't very happy with the stock camera app that came on my phone, so I went looking for a different one. I came across a few that weren't any better(some that were worse) than the stock one, but I eventually settled on one called OpenCamera.

It has so many options, I don't honestly even know what they all do, but I definitely like it better than the default.

One cool thing that it has, in case you plan on taking photos of things in motion, I don't remember what the heck it's called, but there's this thing where it takes anywhere from like 5 up to 20 photographs in really quick succession to try and help capture things in motion better without all the blur, and so you can capture the entire movement and then decide later which particular moment you like better. My default camera app definitely didn't have that.