Set up Camlane on macOS (beta)

What works on macOS today

	Status
Finding and pairing phones	Works
Preview window and remote camera control	Works
Phone as a microphone	Works, through BlackHole
Several phones, studio audio, Watch mode and recordings	Work
Virtual camera for Zoom and others	Not yet. A macOS camera extension is planned

If you need the phone as a camera in a Mac video app today, Camlane can’t do that yet. It’s a good microphone, preview monitor and room-camera recorder in the meantime.

Gatekeeper

Because the beta isn’t notarised, double-clicking it the first time shows a warning with no Open button. Right-click (or Control-click) Camlane in Applications and choose Open. Or, in Terminal:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Camlane.app

To check the download against its published checksum first:

shasum -a 256 camlane-desktop-macos-aarch64.dmg

Compare the result with the builds page.

The microphone: BlackHole

1. Install BlackHole 2ch, from its installer or with brew install blackhole-2ch.
2. In Camlane → Settings → Audio output, choose BlackHole 2ch.
3. In Zoom, Meet, OBS or any app, choose BlackHole 2ch as the microphone.

To hear the phone too, open Audio MIDI Setup, create a Multi-Output Device with BlackHole and your speakers, and choose that in Camlane instead.

Firewall

macOS asks once whether Camlane may accept incoming connections. If you clicked Deny: System Settings → Network → Firewall → Options → Camlane → Allow incoming connections. Even with the firewall closed, the phone can still connect through the fallback, where the Mac dials the phone.