Exactly. I for sure would've thought this would be a "20% time" app as lockdowns became common. Wyze figured out how to allow its security cameras to be used as webcams in March 2020! https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/31/21202022/wyze-firmware-up...

Canon also released an app during lockdown to make your DSLR or mirrorless camera into a webcam too. Shocking how quick companies can do things when a global pandemic pushes them after years of odd tethering and window screen capturing mess I've had with canon before hand for live streaming.

Sadly this app doesn't work with modern Macs and Canon had y their head in the same and refuses to address it.

I ended up getting a Sony mirrorless for a webcam. (Might seem like overkill but I spend a good deal of my time teaching in front of a camera.)

Its like a 5 hour job to get something that technically works and then a 10,000 hour job to get something that works flawlessly. The Apple integration with the iphone and macbook is the most seamless setup I've seen so far but I've still gone back to just using the built in webcam because its too fiddly to put my phone up on the screen and occasionally have issues where it won't connect.

Phone as webcam just doesn't seem like a long term solution, eventually built in webcams will be cheap and good enough. And tbh I find the built in one on the macbook to be bordering on good enough once you consider how compressed and tiny the output will be on the other persons screen.

MVP to full product is definitely the bigger part of the work. In the environment of early COVID, I think an app that had some rough edges would've still been very useful. Perfect is the enemy of good and all that. Phone as webcam shouldn't exist at all (how do you even mount it?), but somehow the video and audio quality on phones is still years ahead of what's available on even high-end laptops.

Rough edge apps have been around for years. I tried one that worked in the browser and could connect to OBS on your laptop, it was just too cumbersome though.

Apple actually did come up with a good solution for mounting the phone. A small disk that connects to the iphone with magsafe and has a flip out tab that can hook on to the top of the macbook. It's surprisingly stable and nice.

As of last week, Apple now has FaceTime on Apple TV using an iPhone or iPad which is equally flawless in my test.

> eventually built in webcams will be cheap and good enough

We've been waiting what, 15 years for this to happen?

I had the opposite experience. I have a personal iPhone and a work iPhone and every time my work iPhone is near my work computer, it switches to it whether I want it to or not. It drives me nuts. It's fine when I want to initiate it but the number of times I've just set my work phone down on my desk thoughtlessly and then tried to start a video meeting in Slack or Teams or Zoom only to not have video because it's using the camera pointing at my desk is too many.

Better late than never. I bought a webcam for those days, but I'm guessing my phone will still have far higher quality.

Exactly. It's not like you suddenly have no more use for video cameras or microphones. The "king" of cheap webcams is still Logitech CX920; anything better than that starts with a separate HDMI capture card and can cost up to an order of magnitude more. Meanwhile you've had a decent camera in your phone all along.

Using a good camera for your video call is simply showing respect to the person/people you're talking with.

I disagree. The most important thing is voice. In meetings we communicate (hopefully), voice should be the top priority. I know how my colleagues look like.

You disagreed, yet I've never said that audio is less important.

Even flagship smartphones don't have studio microphones with 48v phantom power, 32-bit float, pre-amp gain control, etc - that's something you'd have to invest in separately no matter what. But if you can get better video for free, why wouldn't you?

You mention that you never said audio is less important, but they never said that you did so. That doesn't mean it can't be disagreed with.

I completely disagree that good video is a sign of respect. I consider people wanting video on in the first place to be a sign of disrespect. It is rarely important for getting work done and I see it as a waste of resources.

> I completely disagree that good video is a sign of respect. I consider people wanting video on in the first place to be a sign of disrespect. It is rarely important for getting work done and I see it as a waste of resources.

I agree that video is often unnecessary for effective communication, and I too avoid it whenever it's not requested. But there are contexts in which it's great, like occasionally seeing the face of a loved one, who lives far away; or helping debug an issue with a physical object (PCB, server rack, appliance...) that you need to see to understand what's going on. Especially in the latter case, having better video quality is just objectively better, especially if you can get it essentially for free.

That's fair, but largely unrelated. Neither webcams nor phones tend to have super high quality mics. It is best to get a standalone mic to improve quality, or even just high quality bluetooth headphones.

But the builtin camera on phones is a huge area of attention for them. They tend to be amazingly high quality to the point of being overkill as a webcam.

It is a trade-off. You get some things, and you get google's shit product processes.

Tell me that you're not still bitter over Google Reader. Like me.

HA!!!! nah, but since i tried switching my friends to hangouts the first time, i never trusted google with a product release ever.