Old Android phones pile up in a drawer. Each one still has a usable camera, Wi-Fi, and a battery — everything a basic security camera needs. So instead of buying a dedicated cam that routes video through someone else's cloud, I've been building an app that repurposes the phone you already own into a screen-off camera you can watch remotely.
The idea
The whole point is to keep an old phone recording with the screen off, save footage locally on the device, and let you pull up the live feed from another phone or browser when you want to check in. No subscription, no cloud middleman.
Why local-only matters
For a home camera, "where does the video go" is the whole question. Keeping recordings on the device itself means there's no third party holding your footage and nothing to leak from a cloud bucket. Local-only has quietly become table stakes for this category, so the real differentiators end up being screen-off operation and genuinely live remote viewing rather than just motion snapshots.
