Questions

A free, open-source iOS app that records video, audio and stills without putting a camera interface on the screen. The display stays dark while it films and a haptic pulse confirms the start and the stop. It exists for the case where being seen recording is the risk, which is most often a reporter documenting something that somebody would prefer went undocumented.

The preview is the part that gives you away. A live camera feed on a lit screen is readable from several metres in the dark and from across a table in daylight, and it identifies who is filming well before anyone can tell what is being filmed. Taking it out costs you framing accuracy. You point the camera, trust the haptics, and check the footage afterwards.

In blackout mode, yes: no status bar, no home indicator, no controls, brightness at its floor. On an OLED panel a black pixel is unlit, so the display emits about as little as iOS permits. Outside blackout you can optionally keep the current recording parameters visible on the main screen, which is worth doing while you learn the app and worth turning off before you rely on it.

4K or 1080p video on the wide, selfie or ultrawide camera; front and back cameras at the same time as two separate clips, on iPhone XS/XR and newer; audio on its own with adjustable sample rate and channels; and stills.

Signal, at Y01.01. If you report for a living and the app is missing something you need in the field, that is the fastest way to get it in front of me, and requests from people doing the work get built before anything else. Feature requests and discussion of the roadmap are limited to verified media professionals and security researchers, so mention which one you are when you write. If you are reviewing the app on behalf of a newsroom, the source and the build workflow are both public and you are welcome to talk to me while you go through them.

No. There are no accounts, no analytics and no server, and the app contains no networking code that could carry a file anywhere. Recordings go to your photo library, to the on-device vault, or both. The single exception is a library save with iCloud Photos enabled, where Apple's ordinary photo sync applies exactly as it would to any other video.

A save destination inside the app's own sandbox. Vault recordings do not appear in Photos or Files and opening the vault needs Face ID. Two things to hold onto: sandbox storage is deleted along with the app, so use the Both destination for anything you cannot lose, and the vault is an access gate rather than separate encryption, so it will not survive forensic extraction of an unlocked phone.

No, and you should plan on that answer. Anonycord removes the visual signal that you are recording. It does not defend a device that somebody else is holding. A phone that is unlocked, or that you can be compelled to unlock, gives up the vault along with everything else. Get material off the handset and to somewhere else as soon as it is safe to do so, and take advice from your outlet's security desk or a group like Access Now or the Freedom of the Press Foundation on the rest of your setup.

It depends on where you are standing and what you are recording, and the answer changes a lot across borders and even between states. Consent rules differ, audio is often regulated more tightly than video, and press status protects you in some places and not others. Know your local law before you press record. The app is for documenting what is happening around you and to you; it is not for surveilling private individuals, and that line is worth keeping clear in your own head as well as in law.

Partly because it is a deliberate choice about visibility. A store listing is a public entry in a catalogue that anyone can search, rank and watch: it advertises what this app does, and roughly how many people are carrying it, to everyone including the people with an interest in stopping them. Distribution stays quieter without one, and there is no listing for anyone to file a complaint against or have removed in a jurisdiction that decides it would rather this app were not available. Instead it ships as an unsigned IPA built by GitHub Actions from public source, and you install it with a sideloading tool such as AltStore, SideStore, Sideloadly or TrollStore, which signs it with your own Apple ID on your own device.

iOS will not run an app without a cryptographic signature. An unsigned IPA is one that has not been signed yet; your sideloading tool signs it with your certificate at install time. Every release is produced by a public workflow from tagged source and each asset publishes a SHA-256 digest, so you can check that the file you downloaded is the file that was built. If you would rather trust nobody, build it in Xcode yourself.

iOS 15 or later. The app is tested up to current iOS releases (the README notes testing on iOS 26). Dual capture additionally needs an iPhone XS/XR or newer.

That's a signing question, not an app question. Free Apple IDs produce 7-day certificates, so AltStore/SideStore refresh the app automatically in the background. A paid developer certificate lasts a year, and TrollStore (on the iOS versions it supports) installs permanently.

Yes, GPL-3.0, with the full source and the CI workflow on GitHub for anyone to audit. It is a fork of c22dev/Anonycord, which was abandoned upstream. Everything added since is mine and is published under the same licence: haptics, the volume trigger, auto-start, blackout, the vault, save destinations, album sorting and dual capture. GPL-3.0 also means it stays that way, because nobody downstream can close it.

By GitHub Actions on a macOS runner, from the public source, on every push to main and every version tag. The workflow pins an Xcode version, produces an unsigned archive, packages the IPA, and attaches it to the release. Signing is left to your sideloading tool, on your device.

Second-device remote control over a local peer-to-peer connection, and an optional recording time limit with auto-stop. The roadmap lives in the README.