GoKawiilis a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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Even if you love DJI’s drones and cameras, you might not love the company’s bloated closed-source apps that phone home to its cloud servers. But they’re the only way to easily review, manage, and wirelessly download your pocket camera’s footage on the go.
Osmosis, a free open-source app built by DJI watcher Konrad Iturbe (with help from Claude) is an attempt to change that. By reverse engineering the protocol DJI’s cameras use to talk to the official Osmo app, he built his own — which not only lets you download files, but also see thumbnails, stream low-res previews, trim clips down to size, set favorites, filter out only photos or videos or favs, and queue up just the downloads you want.
Here’s the media grid; you can tap any of those four teal buttons to filter or multi-select. You can see my SD card is mostly full, and I have 85 percent battery remaining. Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
I just got it working on my Osmo Pocket 3 and the Osmo Pocket 4P that I easily bought in the US; it’s also been tested on the Osmo Nano, Osmo Action 5 Pro, Osmo Action 6, and it should work on the Xtra versions of those cameras too.
This is a live low-res preview streaming from the camera to the phone. Intriguingly, I can optionally preview, and/or download files, while recording on the camera itself. The pencil button takes me to the edit-and-trim mode. Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
The app isn’t all that polished yet. While it’s pretty easy to pair a new camera — it automatically detects your camera wirelessly and the app can remember more than one — it always takes longer than I’d like to connect and begin paging through my media.
Press a pairing button on the app, then this screen automatically pops up on my camera. Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
Osmosis also doesn’t fully stow the gimbal on my Osmo Pocket 3 the way it does on the 4P below, so the lens is left exposed unless I manually fold it away. And when you’re filtering by Faved, you’re filtering the ones that you’ve hearted in Osmosis, not the ones you’ve hearted on the camera itself.
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