Nowadays, phones come with several rear cameras. It first started with the main sensor at 1x zoom that, well, just takes pictures. After that, the telephoto sensor was adopted. When you start zooming and you reach a certain level of zoom, the camera automatically switches to the telephoto. There are several different kinds of telephoto sensors, but they usually offer 2x, 3x, or even 5x optical zoom.
It didn’t take long for people to focus on zooming out rather than zooming in. While a telephoto sensor can be replaced with hybrid zoom or digital zoom, there is no way to zoom out from the main sensor. In order to capture more of the image, an ultrawide sensor must be used.
Companies have seen to take a note of that. Nearly all Android flagships (even Pixels, more on that later) have adopted the ultrawide sensors into their phones. Even a very large fruit company that will not be named will be implementing ultrawide sensors into their flagships coming this September.
Ultrawide sensors are just so useful for capturing group photos without the need for stepping back. This brings us to the area where I believe ultrawide cameras are hugely lacking in: front-facing cameras. I would gladly take a much wider angle camera over a traditional selfie camera in the front-facing department. The one company that is doing it right is Google. On their Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL, there are 2 front-facing cameras: a main sensor and an ultrawide sensor. Ultrawide sensors are invaluable in times such as selfies.
Marcus Tech Blog 