Hi can i use obs on android

AaronD

Active Member
No.

And no plans for it either.

The reason is performance, and the need for a complete rewrite to make it work on that different of a platform. Not worth the effort if we know up front that it's not going to work anyway.

The hardware that Android runs on is really not that good in terms of processing power. It's designed HEAVILY for power savings (battery runtime), and everything else takes a back seat to that. What appears to be high performance, is likely either:
  • Distracting the user for a while, so it has more time to work on something than you realize, or
  • Sending raw or only lightly-processed data to the cloud, and getting the answer back.
OBS can't do either of those things, just by nature of what it's designed for: high-quality live video. Everything MUST be done on the local device, and it MUST be done in real-time. No chance for the common tricks.

The closest you can come to OBS running on a mobile device, is a "Mobile Workstation" laptop. Unlike most laptops, those are thick and heavy, because they have an actual cooling system! That allows them to keep their published specs indefinitely, instead of throttling way back like most laptops do when people try to produce a serious stream from them.

You can use an Android device as a camera to OBS, which itself runs on a desktop tower or MW and may even use the same Android device's hotspot to upload the finished stream, but I wouldn't expect much more than that.
 
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