How to screen record on Android

Using the built-in recorder

1. Swipe down twice from the top of the screen to open the full Quick Settings panel.
2. Look for Screen record, or Screen recorder on Samsung. If it is not there, tap the pencil or the three-dot edit button and drag the tile in from the available tiles.
3. Tap it. Choose whether to record audio and whether to show touches on screen.
4. Confirm the permission prompt. A three-second countdown starts, then recording begins.
5. To stop, swipe down and tap the recording notification, or tap the stop button in the floating control.

Showing touches is worth turning on for anything you intend other people to follow. Without it a tutorial looks like the screen is operating itself.

Recording the audio you actually want

This is where most recordings go wrong. Android offers up to three audio choices and the labels vary by manufacturer:

• Device audio or Media sounds: what the phone is playing. Right for recording a game, a video or an app with sound.
• Microphone: your voice. Right for narrating a walkthrough.
• Device audio and microphone: both. Right for commentary over gameplay.
• No audio: silent. Right when you are going to add a voiceover later, or turn the result into a GIF.

Two things routinely block internal audio. Apps that use DRM, including most streaming video services, mute the recording deliberately and there is no setting that overrides it. Some manufacturers also disable internal audio capture during calls. If your recording came back silent, this is almost always why.

Where the file goes

Recordings are saved to internal storage, usually in Movies, DCIM/Screen recordings, or a folder called Screenrecorder depending on the manufacturer. The simplest way to find one is to open Google Photos or your gallery app and look in the Movies or Screen recordings album, which is populated automatically.

The output is an MP4, typically at the resolution and refresh rate of your screen. On a high-refresh phone that means a large file quickly: a few minutes at 120 Hz can run to hundreds of megabytes.

When the built-in recorder is not enough

Three common cases:

• Android 10 or older. There is no built-in recorder. You need either a third-party app or a different device.
• You need to record a web app cleanly. Recording a browser tab from a desktop gives a far more usable result than filming a phone screen, especially if the footage is going into a demo or a README.
• You do not want another app. Screen recorder apps on the Play Store are a well-known category for aggressive advertising, watermarks on the free tier, and broad permissions.

The browser recorder captures a tab, a window or the whole screen with microphone or system audio, and writes the file locally. It is the better option whenever the thing you are recording is a website, because you get real resolution instead of a photograph of a phone.

Afterwards

A raw screen recording is rarely the final artefact. Two things people almost always want next:

• Turn it into a GIF for a README, a chat or a bug report, where it will autoplay inline. Trim first, because GIF file size scales directly with length.
• Pull the text out of a frame when the recording caught an error message you need to search for. A screenshot through OCR is faster than typing it out.

Questions