HOW-TO: Turn your Android phone into the best webcam for Zoom, Skype, Meet and Teams for free
Be it for work or school, video communications are skyrocketing. You are probably already using the webcam built into your laptop, or you've upgraded to a USB webcam. But today, we will tell you how you can up your teleconferencing game using your far superior smartphone camera.
Even a mid-range or budget smartphone from a few years ago likely has better camera hardware than a decent USB webcam. Android lacks native support for acting as a webcam for your PC, but that doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means we need to resort to third-party software to do the job.
We hand-picked the best and most popular software solutions for using your Android smartphone as a webcam and dug pretty deep into their strengths and weaknesses so we can single out the best one.
For this test, we included the following apps: Iriun 4K Webcam for PC and Mac, iVCam Webcam, P Webcam, DroidCam, and Xsplit Connect: Webcam.
We put together a list of key features an app like this should have and we created the followingtable to get you started.
| Iriun 4K Webcam for PC and Mac | iVCam Webcam | IP Webcam | DroidCam | Xsplit Connect: Webcam | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Ads | NO | YES | YES (very unobtrusive) | YES | NO |
| Watermark | YES (unobtrusive, only fades in occasionally) | YES (constant and big) | Only on recorded videos | NO | YES (constant and big) |
| Max resolution | 4K | 4K (has 2 quality presents, 60fps mode if available on phone) | 4K (can go as high as DSP, but anything above 720p gets very choppy) | 480p (720p and 1080p in paid version) | 720p and no resolution options, just quality setting in PC app |
| Wireless | YES | YES | YES | YES plus optional Wi-Fi hotspot | YES |
| Wired | YES | YES | NO | YES | YES |
| LAG | ~1s at 4K, down to half a second at 640 x 360px | Depends on settings (from very little at 720p, medium quality to ~2s at max 4K quality) | Significant (~1s up to 720p and ~3s at high res) | Very low (~0.5s) in driver mode, up to 5s in MJPEG mode | Very low (~0.5s) |
| Can choose camera | YES (a bit buggy) | YES (a bit buggy) | YES | YES (a bit buggy) | YES but limited to one rear and one selfie cam |
| Can rotate camera | YES + invert image | YES (rotate only from PC app, invert from phone and PC) | YES | NO (locking in paid version) | NO |
| Captures phone mic audio | YES (often crackling) | NO (Claims to, but it barely works, lags everything and includes audio prompts in free version) | YES (can capture on phone, can not stream to PC) | YES with advanced support for other sources like Bluetooth mic | NO |
| Can record natively | NO | YES, photos and video at 720p can be saved to PC | YES, with advanced motion and audio detection and rollover options | NO | NO |
| Native effects/filters | NO | Single toggle beauty filter, flash toggle | YES plus full control over camera exposure and focus | NO | YES can adjust brightness and white balance |
| Requires client | YES | YES | NO | YES, but can work without through MJPEG stream | YES |
| Multiple phone support | NO | YES (with multiple PC client instances) | YES | YES, but only limited to MJPEG stream | NO |
| Works in background or with Phone screen Off | YES + auto dim screen option | NO background mode, but auto dims screen and disables preview on phone | YES, can also auto launch and trigger on command | YES (can lose some fps) | NO, but can dim display |
| Recovers from connection loss | YES (automatic and very quick) | NO (claims to be searching, but once PC app is stuck, it requires re-launch) | NO (requires manually grabbing steam again) | NO | YES (automatic and very quick) |
| Handles incoming call | YES (you can take the call, continues working with a bit more lag) | YES (you can take the call, no extra lag) | YES (you can take the call, but with more lag) | YES (you can take the call, but with more lag) | YES (you can take the call, no extra lag) |
| Other extras | Controls available on phone and client app, Auto and manual exposure and ISO sliders in PC app, Hardware video decoding and renderer settings in PC app | Amazingly in-depth, but very hard to set up. | Has optional web stream with MJPEG support | Very convincing background remove and swap with image/video/webpage in real time, encoder and network TCP/UDP protocol and port tweaks. | |
| What paid version offers | No watermark, everything else is free anyway | No watermark and no voice prompts in audio capture | Short of custom interfaces and Tasker support, everything is available free. | Even basic features are paid, including HD and FullHD res, autofocus, flip and rotate controls. Pro also offers screenshots, zoom controls, camera flash toggle. | No watermark, everything else is free anyway |
We will be going through the entries on the list, explaining some specifics and idiosyncrasies along the way, so you can really zone-in on the best solution for your personal needs.
We deliberately elected to only include free software, so each package has some features limited or locked behind its paywall. Choosing a solution with just the right combination of free features and compromises is what we feel is going to interest the most people.
We also did our due diligence to test the video quality of each of the solutions and will be including some observations on the subject, including detail, compression, smoothness, and connection stability. We will also throw in a laptop webcam for reference at the end.
And as a little extra bonus, we also did some analysis of the most popular teleconferencing apps themselves, to see what kind of compression they apply to determine whether a high-quality video feed from your phone even makes sens or the other parties are going to see no difference due to compressions. Be sure to read on for those tests, as well.
Iriun 4K Webcam for PC and Mac
Iriun has one of the most popular webcam apps around, as per the ranking in the Google Play Store. Starting with the phone app, you only get very few options laid-out in a convenient and orderly manner. It is simple and straightforward as it should be. There are no ads whatsoever, which is greatly appreciated.
You can select which camera to use, though the selector can be kind of buggy on multi-camera phones, depending on how the manufacturer lists its additional camera modules in software.
You can switch between landscape and portrait orientation, which is great, and also invert the camera feed. There is a toggle for the LED flash and there is an autofocus toggle, which is a nifty addition. So is the ability to dim the screen or even lock the phone and turn the display off entirely. Iriun can do all of those. You can also take incoming calls with no issue while Iriun is running.
The only thing that seems to require a paid subscription is the option to remove the watermark. However the watermark is quite unobtrusive, especially compared to what some competitors are using. It is just a small Iriun text in the top left corner that only fades-in occasionally. Honestly, we don't really mind it.
Like most of the software solutions on the list, Iriun requires an app on your phone, as well as a PC client. While this does add an extra setup step, it is ultimately a good thing since these companion apps allow any teleconferencing app to pick-up your phone as if it were any generic USB webcam. The driver also generally enables a more stable connection, with less lag and delay than using approaches like MJPEG or RTSP.
The PC client app installs with just a few clicks and like its Android counterpart, it has only a few easy to use options. We particularly like the Auto quality mode, which adapts to changing Wi-Fi conditions. It can be especially handy if you intend to move the phone around.
You can get an even more stable connection if you forego Wi-Fi and use a USB connection instead. This functionality is not advertised enough in our opinion as it works great. Disconnecting the phone from Wi-Fi or USB is not a major deal either, since Iriun is very efficient at restoring the connection automatically.
One of the reasons Iriun is so popular is the ability to crank the video quality all the way up to 4K on the free tier. Better still, increasing resolution doesn't really hurt latency too much. You get around 1 second of delay at 4K on a strong Wi-Fi connection, and that drops to just about 1/2 second at the lowest 360p setting. You can see how these compare in terms of quality in the screenshots below.
Latency on your webcam app can actually be a major deal depending on whether your solution of choice can capture and stream the phone's microphone or not and whether you decide to do that or use a separate mic. Iriun is one of the few apps that can stream audio with video, and since both have the same delay, they will be in sync. However, we would actually advise against using Iriun for audio, since the quality is often bad and there is a lot of crackling and distortion. The video delay is low enough so you can grab a separate mic or use the built-on built in your laptop.
iVCam Webcam
iVCam Webcam is another very popular app in the Google Play Store, likely since it also delivers up to 4K resolution on its free tier. Unlike Iriun, it does have ads inside the smartphone app, but mostly just one at startup and one after you have ended a session - we can certainly live with that.
The app only has a single interface screen, but in a slightly different way than Iriun. Only a few options are left on the app UI, with all of them also accessible through the Windows app, which is a nifty idea since it allows you to just connect the phone and not touch it afterwards.
One thing you can only adjust from the app is the camera selection. You can only flip between what the phone deems the main back camera and the main selfie one, regardless of how many cameras it actually has, which is a bit of a bummer.
The camera view can be inverted, as well as set to portrait or landscape. Though, the latter is oddly only accessible from the Windows app. In any case, pretty much every control is present in the Windows app, which is more important in our mind.
If there is one thing that really distinguishes iVCam from Iriun, it is the number of settings and amount control you get from the Windows app. iVCam really goes above and beyond, including toggles for autofocus, exposure and white balance, as well as a filter or "beauty" mode. You can also manually adjust exposure and ISO on sliders.
Resolution settings are accessed through the Windows app and you also get an FPS toggle, which can go all the way up to 4K@60fps, if your phone and DSP can support that. We really don't know why you would want anything beyond 30fps on a webcam, but the option is there.
You should probably avoid higher framerates, unless you really need them, though, since iVCam has notably higher latency, ranging from sub 1 second at 720p and below to over 2 seconds at 4K. Interestingly enough, switching over to a USB connection doesn't improve latency.
Just like with Iriun, the USB connection mode is not really advertised too much in iVCam.
Another thing iVCam devs seem to have skipped on is connection recovery. Despite our best efforts, upon losing either Wi-Fi or USB connection to the phone, iVCam never could restore the connection automatically, always requiring some manual intervention.
Audio recording is also not a strong point of iVCam. While the feature is officially supported, we never actually managed to get it working reliably. Audio quality was horrible and it actually made the video more laggy as well. Even if we got it to work, though, the free version of the app includes voice prompts in the audio, which is a lot harder to live with, even compared to the huge and rather obtrusive watermark, constantly present on the iVCam video feed.
iVCam can't work in the background. If you lock the phone, the app gets killed. You can have the app automatically dim the phone screen a bit. However, even with that option enabled, our handset got hotter over time with iVCam compared to other solutions simply because the display was on.
To be fair, iVCam does compensate for some of these deficiencies, by offering some extra features, like native video and image capture. Both of these get saved on your PC. You can also adjust the video encoder format streamed from the phone to the PC and hardware decoding is supported on the PC side for better performance.
There is also a quality slider in settings, which did not seem to affect the actual quality that much. Still, we took all the sample screenshots at the maximum quality setting. Also, it is worth noting that iVCam has an official guide on how to run multiple client instances on your PC and connect many smartphones to one PC, in case you need that functionality.
XSplit Connect: Webcam
XSplit is a very popular name in the streaming space. Its toolkit includes a smartphone webcam app, but surprisingly that one is not nearly as popular as Iriun or iVCam. A lot of that might actually be down to the lack of 4K support. As far as we managed to determine, XSplit just works at 720p as a whole. Even purchasing the paid version does not increase resolution. All it does is remove the watermark, with all other features already available free. The watermark itself is quite obtrusive, just like iVCam's which is potentially motivation enough to spend the money.
Just like iVCam, you can only choose between one main camera and one selfie one. It is quite infuriating that you are automatically locked to portrait mode for the selfie cam and landscape for the main one. You cannot rotate the camera in any way.
On the flip side, we do appreciate the simplicity of the main app UI. You can only toggle the flashlight and that's about it. White balance and brightness settings are available in a sub-menu. The settings section includes the ability to dim the display or even show black while streaming. That's admittedly one better than iVCam's solution, since on OLED phones the display does not generate extra heat. Even so, Xsplit does not work in the background and if the phone locks, the app dies.
On the plus side, Xsplit earns back quite a few points for its advanced encoder and connection settings. If for any reason, your current network setup misbehaves with one particular setup, you should be able to tweak it. Failing that, USB connection is supported and works just as well as Wi-Fi. Xsplit also does a great job of recovering from connection loss, just like Iriun.
Regardless of what connection you use, Xsplit has an impressively low lag. Probably the lowest of the bunch, going by observation, since we can't reliably measure it. Too bad then that it can't stream the phone's microphone at all. Still, having low lag is appreciated since it's less likely to appear out of sync with whatever microphone you do end up using.
The Xsplit Windows app is pretty slick and modern and includes convenient tutorials and usage guides. Much appreciated.
Notable options include hardware acceleration, a quality selector, which does a great job of adjusting in Auto mode. You can also force a lower resolution by disabling HD mode, and you can force 30fps mode (up from the default 24fps).
The Xsplit's "killer feature" is the ability to remove your camera background in real-time and substitute it with anything from a static image, a video (local or YouTube) or a webpage. The app even has access to the online image repository Unsplash to automatically fetch backgrounds for you.
Plenty of adjustments are available for the background effect and media. One particularly interesting thing we noticed is that the Xsplit application lists any device on the system that claims to be a webcam. Meaning that you could potentially use one of the other apps to deliver the feed to the PC, if you prefer its options and behavior and then use Xsplit for its background effects alone. However, this does not remove the watermark. You still have to get the paid version for that.
Here are some samples from Xsplit with and without the background removal options. It is worth noting that autofocus was a bit less reliable than we would have liked while using Xsplit. It did work, but was just a bit sluggish, and the app does not offer any settings to adjust that.
DroidCam
DroidCam is one of the oldest solutions for using your phone as a webcam. A fact you can definitely guess by the old-school UI. We won't really hold that against it, though. Plus, it has no ads at all.
Some observations in terms of options in no particular order - white balance can be set to auto or a number of other modes, and you can lock the exposure. Fo