New in OS X Yosemite: Record Your iPhone or iPad Screen with QuickTime

By Jim Tanous on October 21, 2014 at 1:44 AM • @mggjim

The ability to record an iPhone or iPad screen has long been available, but it required some work to get it going, such as jailbreak-only apps or AirPlay. With OS X Yosemite and iOS 8, Apple has now made recording the iPhone or iPad an easy and simple task. The key is QuickTime.

To record iPhone or iPad output on your Mac, make sure you’re running OS X Yosemite and iOS 8. Then connect your iPhone or iPad to your Mac using a Lightning cable. Note that you may need to “Trust” your Mac before the iPhone will work.

Launch QuickTime and select File > New Movie Recording from the menu bar. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Option-Command-N. This will launch a new QuickTime window for video recording. By default, QuickTime will activate your Mac’s built-in iSight camera, but ignore that and find and click on the small downward-facing triangle next to the record button. This lets you select an alternate recording source, which now includes your iPhone or iPad.

Select your iPhone or iPad from the list and you’ll see your device’s screen replicated in the QuickTime window. To provide that extra bit of professional polish, Apple automatically shows a clean iOS status bar, with full cellular reception, a full battery, and the historic 9:41 AM time setting, making your own iPhone recordings look just like Apple’s.

The QuickTime recording also recognizes iPhone or iPad rotation, so you’ll see the preview window on your Mac switch aspect ratios as you rotate your device.

The recording itself is near real-time, but there is some noticeable lag between performing an action on your device and seeing the action occur in the QuickTime window. This won’t be an issue for actual iPhone recordings, as the software will sync audio and video for the final output, but this does mean that you won’t want to use this feature while live to play games or perform tasks that require minimal latency.

As for audio, you can either record your iPhone or iPad screen and add audio later during post and editing, or you can record audio live with the video. Using the same drop-down menu from which you selected your iPhone screen, select the desired source you’d like to use for audio. This can be your Mac’s built-in microphone for narration, a third-party audio source, or the iPhone itself if you want to record the sound and music produced by the apps you plan to demonstrate.

When you’re done recording, just hit the stop button in the QuickTime preview window. You can then save the recording as a QuickTime movie (.mov) on your computer, or use the presets at File > Export to create a version optimized for certain resolutions or devices.

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http://www.techsmith.com/ Daniel Foster

Here’s a video I worked on that shows how to record iOS devices with Yosemite, step by step:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag_UNH1vJIg

Hope it’s helpful!
Stuart McKever

Didn’t know about this - great tip. Thank you
Wai Suen Fergus Ma

Is there a way to show where I tab on my iPhone? so when I do a tutorial, people can just see where I point and tap
- http://www.techsmith.com/ Daniel Foster
  
  Hi Wai - there are a couple of options for this.
  
  If you are doing a tutorial about an app you built, you can add a touch visualization library like Touchpose to your app. That will make your touch gestures visible while recording the screen.
  
  If you don’t have access to the app’s source code, your best bet is to use a tool like Camtasia for Mac to add the touches after recording your tutorial.
  
  I hope this helps!
  - Wai Suen Fergus Ma
    
    Thank you for the fast reply.
    I am trying to record game play tutorials, so I have to touch on my iPhone screen, but it will be hard the viewers to know where I touched. Even for myself after I was watching the recorded clips, anything that can show where I touch/tap during the record?
    
    Thanks again for your time
    - http://www.techsmith.com/ Daniel Foster
      
      It is a tough problem…Apple does not pass along any metadata to the screen recording software so there’s no good way to know where and when touches occurred. Camtasia can do this for mouse events on desktop but I don’t know of any solution that automatically applies touch callouts to a mobile recording (apart from the developer libraries referenced above).
  - Cynthia Young
    
    Thank you for sharing these additional tools. I’m trying to do some lean UI/UX testing and this may just do the trick!
pendolino

this feature is fantastic
jerryjdavis

Mind blown! Have many, many uses for this. Thank you!
Eddy

Hi
How do you made the screenshot looks like its made from outside? Is this a picture and you mount the screenshot into the display? Or is there an app for?
Thx
icerabbit

Is lightning required? Any other restrictions on the iOS device that can be used for this?
My QT says no camera despite there being two cameras in the iPad 3 with dock connector. Since it supports AirPlay and mirroring over wifi, I’d have thought it’d be fast enough to share video over the wire.
- http://www.techsmith.com/ Daniel Foster
  
  Yep, screen recording is only supported on devices with a Lightning port and iOS 8.x. I couldn’t tell you the technical reasons why Apple did not support it on older devices, but I do know that AirPlay doesn’t deliver the same quality.
Sumeet Sharma

Best way to Record iPhone and iPad Screen Wirelessly (No Jailbreak)?
http://www.iappnalysis.com/2015/01/how-to-record-iphone-and-ipad-screen-no-jailbreak.html
Larissa Keiser

Strange, I have all the right software, the cable and when I open up a quicktime movie, the iphone does not appear as an option. Any suggestions?
- Cynthia Young
  
  This happens to me too, but when I plug other people’s iphones into my mac. It worked only once with someone else’s phone, another time one person couldn’t update their iphone OS so I assume that’s why I couldn’t select their phone as an option. Another time, I couldn’t even get to the point to “trust” for another users phone. What are we missing? Is it just a requirement to update the iphone before connecting? What else could we be missing?
Pikabruce

This works fine, but while recording, the audio cannot be heard on either device while it is being captured. I can play it afterwards OK. How can I continue to hear the audio even while doing the capture? (I want to use Skype on my iPad and capture the video/audio on my Mac. I can do this, but I can’t hear the sound while doing the capture, which makes it useless for this purpose.)
- http://www.twitter.com/fosteronomo Daniel Foster
  
  I had this same issue on an older MBP recently. I was able to use TechSmith AppShow (free) instead, and it played back the device audio during recording. I can’t guarantee it will work for you, but might be worth a try. Disclosure: I work for the company that makes AppShow.
http://www.411soul.com Ramesh Babu

Why is it that I cannot see my device in drop down, I connected it using the cable
Bella

I tried exactly this using QuickTime 10. However when I tried to edit in iMovie, due to the iMovie aspect ratio being 16:9 and quictime 10 aspect ratio being 4:3, iMovie either cuts off the tops to fit screen or you get side black bars when you try to fill the screen. In other words, you are left with a video with 2 black bars or a video with top and bottom cropped off. I have been unable to find any solution to this other than downloading QuickTime 7 or some other screen capture program. This small glitch defeats the whole purpose of recording in QuickTime 10 and editing in iMovie to post on YouTube. There is nothing in QuickTime 10 to even change the aspect ratio. Anyone have a solution?