Turn a spare old iPhone into a home presence camera
HomeGlance is one app with two roles: put an old iPhone in camera mode at home, and use your everyday phone in viewer mode to check in from anywhere. Video, audio and recordings travel only between your own devices, end-to-end encrypted, and never pass through our servers.
What it does
Presence detection
Human detection runs on the camera phone itself (Apple Vision) to tell whether someone is in view, with debouncing so the state does not flicker. It only answers "is a person there" — no face recognition, no identifying who.
Live view
720p H.264 with hardware encoding and decoding. Nothing is encoded while nobody is watching, which saves battery and heat. The live screen shows whether you are on a direct or relayed connection, and the current bitrate.
Two-way talk
Push to talk, AAC-ELD audio with the system echo canceller. You can also just listen to what the camera hears.
Push alerts
Person appeared, person left, and camera offline — each with a thumbnail, and each switchable per camera.
Clips
An MP4 is recorded automatically when a person is detected, including a few seconds of pre-roll from before the event. Files stay on the camera phone and are pruned automatically against a storage quota.
Timeline
See a whole day of presence intervals plus that day's clips, and play, delete or share them from the viewer.
Low-light assist
In dim light the camera can briefly switch on the torch to help detection. Duration and conditions are configurable, and the feature can be turned off entirely.
Several viewers
Multiple phones on the same account can watch the same camera. Cameras on other accounts are never visible to you.
How it connects, and what that means for privacy
The two devices form a private network using WireGuard embedded in the app. It needs no system VPN permission and does not take over the rest of your phone's traffic. When a direct path can be established the devices talk directly; when it cannot, packets are relayed. Either way the payload is encrypted and decrypted on the devices themselves, so a relay only ever sees ciphertext.
Never sent to our servers: video, audio, recorded clips, snapshots, the timeline. They exist only on your two devices.
What our servers do handle: your account (Sign in with Apple), pairing, online/offline status, and push notifications (including event thumbnails, kept for 7 days). See the privacy policy.
Requirements
| Role | Device | System |
|---|---|---|
| Camera mode | iPhone 6s or newer | iOS 15.0 or later |
| Viewer mode | iPhone | iOS 17.0 or later |
Getting started
- Install HomeGlance on your everyday phone, choose viewer mode, and sign in with your Apple ID (Sign in with Apple).
- Install HomeGlance on the old iPhone, choose camera mode, and grant the camera, microphone, local network and notification permissions. The screen then shows a pairing QR code and a six-character pairing code.
- On the viewer, tap "+" and scan that QR code, or type the six-character code by hand. Once paired, the camera joins your private network automatically.
- Position the old phone and plug it in. Camera mode dims the screen to black and keeps running; tap the screen to open settings briefly, and it returns to black after 30 seconds of inactivity.
Availability
HomeGlance is not released yet — it is being prepared for App Store review. There is no unofficial install channel here.