iCameraPlus vs TetherCam

Turn the spare iPhone in your drawer into a 24/7 security camera — and watch it from your everyday iPhone. iCameraPlus records non-stop on a dedicated phone and uploads every clip to your private cloud archive, so your footage stays safe even if the camera phone is taken or damaged. Watch live, browse the archive and control your cameras with the iCameraPlus app in Viewer mode or from any web browser. HOW 24/7 WORKS ON IPHONE iOS does not let apps record video in the background, so the camera iPhone stays on its charger with iCameraPlus open on screen. Protected Mode — Apple's built-in Guided Access, set up in about a minute with our step-by-step guide — keeps the app on screen 24/7 and disables the side button. If recording stops (for example, the app was closed), iCameraPlus tells you and resumes recording when it is opened again. CAMERA MODE — the phone that records • Continuous loop recording in 480p, 720p or 1080p at 30 fps, with the camera name, date and time on every frame. • Automatic upload to your private cloud over HTTPS. Uploads resume after Wi-Fi drops, and recording continues without internet — clips upload when the connection returns. • Smart recording adjusts quality and clip length when uploads slow down, the phone gets hot or storage runs low. • Sound is off by default; turn it on only where recording audio is legal. • Guided setup: account, permissions, camera name, a 24/7 checklist and a test recording. VIEWER MODE (NEW) — your everyday iPhone • All your cameras with status, battery, connection and alerts. • Watch live with one tap. • Start or stop recording and change camera, quality, clip length, brightness, rotation, touch lock, sound and upload network remotely. • Open the recordings archive: timeline, previews, playback and download. A viewer phone never records and never asks for camera or microphone access. WEB PANEL Everything above from any browser at icameraplus.com, plus device details and charts. PLANS • 7-day free trial with your account — no card needed, and it never turns into a paid plan by itself. • Yearly plans for 2, 4, 6 or 8 cameras: 99.99 / 175.99 / 244.99 / 319.99 USD per year (prices vary by country; the app shows your local price before you buy). • Each camera keeps its last 10 days of recordings. Days are pooled across your plan: with fewer active cameras, each keeps more (an 8-camera plan with one camera keeps 80 days). Payment is charged to your Apple ID at confirmation of purchase. The subscription renews automatically unless it is cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period; renewal is charged within 24 hours before the period ends. Manage or cancel anytime in Settings > your name > Subscriptions. PRIVACY Your recordings are stored in your own private account and are visible only to you. iCameraPlus is meant for monitoring your own property: respect other people's privacy and local laws, and never record in private areas such as bathrooms or bedrooms. Privacy Policy: https://icameraplus.com/privacy Terms of Use (EULA): https://icameraplus.com/terms Support: icamatrixsys@gmail.com

Your iPhone, instead of a webcam. TWO APPS, ONE CABLE TetherCam is two free apps. TetherCam for Mac is downloaded from tethercam.app; TetherCam for iPhone is this one. Install both, connect the phone to the Mac with the USB cable you already own, and the iPhone shows up as the camera "TetherCam" on the Mac, in the same camera picker as the built-in one. It works in every Mac app that lists system cameras: Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, FaceTime, QuickTime Player, Safari, Chrome and the rest. Zoom and Microsoft Teams were verified on 10 September 2026. Nothing travels over Wi-Fi, nothing passes through a server, nothing is uploaded anywhere. There is no account, no pairing code and no discovery step. The cable is the whole path, which is why the picture stays stable in a crowded room where wireless cameras start to stutter. WHAT YOU NEED An iPhone with iOS 17 or newer, a Mac with macOS 14 or newer, and the USB cable that came with the phone. The free TetherCam Mac app asks once for approval of its camera extension in System Settings; after that the camera is simply there. THE HONEST LIMITS The Mac app carries the picture only. A Mac camera extension has no audio stream, so the sound stays with the Mac's own microphone. Audio over the cable exists, but only on the OBS path below. This iPhone app stays open in the foreground while it sends. The phone serves one receiver at a time. The Mac app and the OBS plugin are not used together; whichever connects second is told that the line is busy. ON THE PHONE Live preview from the moment you open the app, before anything is connected. A camera and lens picker for the wide, ultra wide and telephoto lenses or the front camera, switching the stream immediately. Automatic rotation that follows the horizon rather than the interface. Turn the phone and the picture stays level, because the orientation is resolved on the capture side. There is a manual angle override when you want to decide yourself. Hardware HEVC encoding, which keeps the phone cool and the latency low. A diagnostics panel that shows what is actually happening: listener state, connection, frames per second, bitrate and the measured levelling residual. FOR STREAMING AND RECORDING: OBS STUDIO The TetherCam plugin for OBS Studio is the pro path, also free and also at tethercam.app. It adds a source called TetherCam directly in OBS, finds the phone through the same cable, and it is the only path that brings the microphone of the phone across as well. PRIVACY No account, no analytics, no advertising, no purchases. The camera picture goes to your own Mac and nowhere else. Nothing is collected. TetherCam for iPhone is free and open source under the MIT licence at github.com/Kanevry/tethercam.