from the article:
For several years Sony had offered a free “External Monitor” app that let you use select Xperia-branded phones as an external display for some of the company’s high-end cameras. The Xperia 1 VII originally shipped without that feature, but now you can use the phone as camera display… if you pay at least $5 per month or $50 per year for a subscription.
Not only that, but for older phones that had these features for free, with the new version of the app, some features are locked behind subscription:
But on August 28, 2025, Sony announced an update that “expanded paid plan lineup for greater flexibility.” That flexibility locks a few key features behind a paywall, including: …
Seems like this would be pretty straightforward (for anyone interested enough) to implement with any phone.
Doubly weird that Sony would take an approach that could motivate the swaths of technical folks to write their own.
I don’t know if that’s true. I think their monitor software has more than video out, they had the camera software running on the phone, so I think you could effectively operate it from the phone. Plus it was meant to be a cheapo replacement for their professional monitors specifically made for those cameras, which are very expensive.
They had a value proposition there, just… for a tiny narrow band of people who somehow owned one of a handful of very expensive cameras but were more willing to replace their phone instead of writing off the cost of additional hardware.
I think their original idea was for Youtubers and streamers using their cameras to set up with those and then complement their setup with their phone. The earlier phones came with streaming software built right in for some form of multicam streaming. It was nuts how specific the whole deal was. Fortunately setting things up like that required a lot of common sense features other phones have given up on, so now all three of us just can’t go back to Samsung spyware platforms or whatever normies are using these days.