TetherCam
Your iPhone as a USB webcam for Mac and OBS
Details
- External ID
- 1246879
- Source
- PH
- Company
- —
- Product
- TetherCam
- Website domain
- producthunt.com
- Launched
- Sept. 11, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 2
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7405388069275176
- Tags
- Open Source, Photography, Meetings, GitHub
- Fetched at
- Sept. 13, 2026, 1:01 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 13, 2026, 1:01 a.m.
Description
Two free apps turn your iPhone into a USB webcam for your Mac. Select TetherCam in Zoom, Teams, Meet or another app that lists system cameras. The Mac app outputs 1080p30 video; choose a separate microphone for calls. The optional OBS plugin receives video and iPhone microphone audio. Requires iOS 17+ and macOS 14+ for the Mac app. Free and open source.
Enrichment
- Theme
- cross-device control and OS utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- iphone as usb webcam for mac
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Requires low-level iOS and macOS systems engineering, custom USB communication protocols, driver-level CoreMediaIO camera extensions, and an OBS native C++ plugin.
What it would actually take: Requires Swift/Objective-C for iOS and macOS, alongside C++ for the OBS plugin. The core architecture demands low-latency H.264/video streaming over USB via usbmuxd/libimobiledevice, writing a macOS Camera Extension (CMIOExtension) to register as a system webcam, and implementing direct frame rendering inside OBS's capture pipeline without frame buffering.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 318 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #74 of 319 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 317 days after the earliest competitor.
- TetherShot · ph · 2026-09-07 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- CamForge · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Osmotic · ph · 2026-09-21 · 65 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- OffgridCam · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Log Cam: RAW 4K Video Camera · ph · 2026-09-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Shacam for macOS · hn · 2026-06-29 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- DanceTake · ph · 2026-09-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- iMCBridge – Remote Desktop · ph · 2026-09-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Fintech yet.