How to use android smartphone as webcam on MacOS (as a webcam adapter)

5 min readJan 19, 2021

A few months ago I had to bring home the mac-mini that I use in my company’s office. I don’t have a webcam so I started looking for tutorials to make this bridge between my phone’s camera and the video input source for apps like Google Meet, Discord and Skype. I found and tried to use some solutions and all of them did not serve my real purpose.

Some software had only one window with the video that was captured by the cameras on my smartphone, but it did not work as a webcam driver being able to be selected as a source (would work for OBS for sure, but not interested), so I went after to develop my own method and after a couple of hours, I got a solution that 100% satisfied what I needed.

It is important to clarify that to work correctly, you will use the web version of these apps using Google Chrome, nothing will work using Safari or installed apps.

Best of all, you only need two applications to work, one installed on your smartphone (which works in a limited way with the free license, like presenting a watermark) and one on MacOS and it is completely free.

Now let’s get to the details…

First you will download the IP Webcam application on Google Play. (Note that there is a paid version without limitations, which will work in exactly the same way as will be explained here.)

Download link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pas.webcam

We will configure the IP Webcam to function as a web server. Open the app on your smartphone, go to Video Preferences. Choose the camera you want to use as your primary camera, I used the front camera (but you can use the rear camera). You can also configure the video quality, orientation, image balance, etc.

Go back to the previous screen and go to Local Broadcasting. I added a login and password to set up a security layer and also changed the default port from 8080 to 9000. (I already work with port 8080 in other applications, I am a developer and port 8080 is sacred for some processes I use).

Everything we need to do in this application to work is already done, you can configure some more things as you prefer, but what we did here is enough.

Now let’s move to MacOS …

Open your computer’s browser at the address indicated on your cell phone. The default is “Internal IP: port”. (E.g: 192.168.0.5:9000). Note that the IP is your Smartphone wi-fi IP address and the port here is the same we configured earlier.

In Video renderer, select Browser to make sure that the video is being captured and that we set everything up correctly. If the video is not showing, you did something wrong at some previous point and you will need to go back a few steps and configure again.

The second application we will install on MacOS is called Webcamoid.

Download link: https://webcamoid.github.io/

Scroll down to the for Mac section and download the Installable application. (did not try portable version, you can check if you want)

For your knowledge, this IP Webcam + Webcamoid solution can also be used on Windows, just download the version for the platform and make the correct settings, but due to the lack of material for Android + MacOS for Google Meet, I dedicated this article for this purpose.

Install the Webcamoid app on your Mac and then open it.

Make sure that the Virtual camera option is checked.

Now click on the Webcam icon in the bottom menu (Configure sources) and you will see a button to Add in the bottom left corner (Green button with a plus symbol), click this button.

Fill in the two input fields with a name for this virtual webcam adapter that we are creating and in the address(E.g: Webcam adapter), use the webserver address that the IP Webcam provided us with, adding a slash and the word video at the end. (E.g: http://192.168.100.3:9000/video) and click on OK button.