How to Use Your iPhone as a Webcam on Riverside in 2026

If you're trying to use your iPhone as a webcam on Riverside, it's super easy.

The first step is basically logging in on desktop and making sure that you are joining the studio as you normally would. Your built-in webcam. In this case, my laptop is folded and I'm using a second screen, so the webcam isn't even available, but I'm leaving all these settings here as is.

Normally you would select for your microphone, the higher quality option that you have available. Then you hit Join Studio.

Now the second step is to make sure that you have the Riverside app on mobile.

You're going to log in. Then once you're logged in, you hit create. And then you'll see an option connect device as second camera.

I'm gonna go ahead and tap that. Permissions will be enabled. If you don't have that, just toggle those on. Once you've given permissions, you'll see this option join session. I'm gonna tap that once I've joined the session.

I'm gonna take a look at the desktop and in this right hand corner you'll see that I can see second camera. And I can't really see it on the total screen here, but I can see that I have joined and that the camera is on, but the mic is off. And then on my desktop here, I wanna make sure that the mic is on, but I'm gonna go ahead and turn the camera off.

Now I'm gonna go ahead and hit record. We see the 3, 2, 1 countdown on the phone and I also see it on desktop. We can see that it's recording. I'm gonna let it go for a couple more seconds and then basically let me go ahead and just hit stop.

As you can see, it's uploading everything right from mobile and from desktop is good to go, but it's taking a little bit longer for the mobile version to get uploaded. Once both are done, I'm going to hit go to project.

Next up, I'm gonna go over into the recordings tab. As you can see in this example, it has both screens, right? It has my mobile camera right here, and then this black part is what would have been, you know, my MacBook if it was open.

So I'm gonna go ahead and tap on edit. And then in the right hand side, I'm gonna tap the tracks tab, and then I'm gonna leave this second camera alone because this is the one I wanna prioritize for now. But this desktop camera, I'm going to toggle down there and then basically hit hide video the second that I do that, you'll notice that disappeared. Right? So if I tap this again, you'll see that it's still here on the right hand side. And I don't want that in my layout. So I'm gonna hide this video.

And then the only reason by the way that you are seeing, this zoomed up so close, and this is a great mistake to highlight, is I have the phone vertically positioned versus if I had it horizontally positioned. And I would use something like a tripod. Sometimes I stack this tripod on top of a book or two.

But basically what this does is it allows you and the person that's recording. If you're showing up as a guest, for example, they have the best, you know, landscape quality possible. And then what that does when you're positioned in landscape is, you can always zoom in and crop vertically as needed. But if you shoot vertically, like I just did in the example, you're gonna run into this issue where, you know, it's a little too zoomed in and I can fix this, but I'd rather not have to. So make sure that you do that.

But that's really all there is to it. So I hope that was useful. Lemme know if you have any questions and if you're new to Riverside, make sure to use my discount code PODMAHAL to get 15% off.

Thanks again for watching / skimming and I'll see you on the next one.