SODA - Natural Beauty Camera

Review by eFreeware

Most beauty cameras ask you to shoot first and fix later. SODA takes the opposite route: the makeup, the color filter and the skin smoothing are all applied while you are still composing the shot, so the photo that lands in your gallery is already the finished version. That single decision shapes everything else about the app.

It comes from SNOW Corporation and sits in the Photography category on Google Play, where it has passed 10 million installs and holds a 4.2 average across 180,315 ratings. The app is free to download, carries no ads, and offers in-app purchases. I'd expect it to appeal to people who take a lot of selfies and would rather not spend a second pass in a separate editor.

Makeup and filters in one tap

The core of SODA is the pairing of makeup and filters. Instead of picking a lip color here and a mood filter there, the app bundles them, and the developer's pitch is that a single tap gets you a trendy look without having to decide which pieces go together. For anyone who has stared at a grid of filter thumbnails trying to work out which one flatters their skin, that shortcut is the whole point.

The color filters are described as being chosen with selfies in mind rather than landscapes or street scenes, and the idea is that you can move between different moods by swapping the filter rather than by changing your lighting or your expression. I like that the makeup and the filter are treated as one decision, because that is how most people actually think about a look.

What appeals to me is the reduction in steps. You open the camera, you tap once, you shoot. Nothing about that requires you to understand color grading or blending, and the results are meant to be consistent enough that you can repeat a look you liked.

Skin and portrait work while you shoot

The beauty side is built around real-time processing. Blemish touch-ups and natural-looking skin effects are applied live, and the developer promises you can get the selfie right the first time rather than editing afterward. That matters for anyone who shoots in bursts and does not want to review twenty frames later.

Portrait mode adds depth to an otherwise flat phone photo. You tap the area you want in focus and the app adjusts around it, which is a simple enough interaction that it does not interrupt the flow of taking pictures. The effect is the difference between a photo that looks like a record of a moment and one that looks composed.

There is also a high resolution mode, which the app presents as the answer to image quality. Selfies taken at higher resolution hold up better if you plan to crop, print or post them somewhere that does not compress them into mush.

Editing after the fact, including group shots

Recent updates have pushed SODA beyond the live camera. You can now edit several photos at once rather than working through them one by one, which is useful if you came back from an event with a batch of shots that all need the same treatment.

AI Remove has been upgraded so that it automatically spots distractions, with creases, shadows and glare given as examples. The appeal there is obvious: a shadow across a face or a glare spot on a window behind you can ruin an otherwise good frame, and removing it by hand is fiddly work.

Body editing has also been reworked so that you can adjust one person in a group photo without touching everyone else. That is a meaningful change for anyone who has tried to slim a single figure in a shot and watched the whole image warp around them.

What you agree to when you install it

SODA asks for camera access to take pictures and video, and audio access to record sound in video. It also requests read and write access to external storage, which covers importing photos to edit and saving your results back out. Location is requested so that the app can record where a shot was taken.

Those are the standard asks for a camera app, and they line up with what the app does rather than going beyond it. It is worth reading them once so you know that location information can end up attached to your photos.

Beyond that, there is not much to set up: it is a free download for anyone in the Everyone rating band, and the in-app purchases are there if you want them. The app has been on Google Play since October 2018 and was last updated in September 2026, so it is a long-running product rather than a recent experiment.

Where SODA fits and where it doesn't

SODA is built for faces. The filters, the skin effects and the portrait tool all assume a person is the subject, and the high resolution mode exists to make that person look sharper. If your photos are mostly of food, buildings, pets or landscapes, the app's strengths are largely beside the point.

The person I picture getting the most from it is someone who takes selfies regularly, wants a consistent look across them, and has no interest in learning an editing suite. The one-tap combination of makeup and filter means you do not have to develop a taste for color grading to get a result you like.

The batch editing and the group-photo body tools widen that a little. Someone who shoots with friends and then wants to tidy up a handful of frames in one pass now has a reason to keep the app installed between selfie sessions. It is still a beauty camera at heart, but it handles the follow-up work too.

The trade-off is that the app's judgment is baked into the result. For most people that is the appeal; for anyone who wants granular control over every layer, it is a constraint.

A selfie camera for people who dislike editing

SODA makes the most sense for anyone who wants a good selfie without a second step. The live makeup and skin effects, the selfie-oriented filters and the tap-to-focus portrait mode all serve that one goal, and the batch editing and group-photo tools cover the cleanup afterward. It is free, it carries no ads, and the in-app purchases are there for those who want them.

I'd point it toward regular selfie-takers who value speed over manual control, and toward anyone who shoots in groups and wants to fix a single person without reworking the entire frame. If your camera roll is mostly scenery, the app's strengths will not come into play. For faces, it is a focused tool that does one job and does it in one tap.

What's new in version 10.4.2

[Batch] Feature Added Edit multiple photos at once! [AI Remove] Upgraded AI automatically detects distractions! Easily remove things like creases, shadows, and glare [Body] Upgraded Edit only the person you want, even in a group photo