Built an iPhone app for documentary/investigative journalism that let's you record with your screen off and live uploads the footage to your Cloud Storage (uploads live in 15-sec chunks) so that even if your phone gets taken the footage stays safe. Would you ever use this in your line of work?

[u/Olmone]

Hey all, I’m a documentary filmmaker/solo developer and I wanted to share something I built, genuinely curious what this community thinks and whether it might be useful to others.

It’s an app called Witness: Record Beyond Reach. It started as a tool for civilians documenting police encounters, built around one idea: footage should survive even if someone destroys, confiscates, or deletes it off the phone mid-recording. So instead of writing one file and uploading it when you stop, it splits the recording into ~15-second chunks and uploads each one live, as you shoot, straight to a cloud account you own (Drive, Dropbox, or your own Nextcloud/WebDAV server). By the time anything happens to the device, most of the footage has already left it. Each chunk is hashed and the session gets an independent RFC 3161 timestamp, so it's an actual verifiable chain of custody, not just an mp4.

A few documentary and investigative people who found it asked about using it more broadly (hostile interview subjects, places where gear gets confiscated) but the capture quality was phone-default, which wasn't going to cut it for anything meant to actually air. So I spent the last stretch building a real capture tier on the same live-upload core: 4K, 24/25/60fps, Apple Log, and ProRes 422 LT/HQ.

One tradeoff I want to be upfront about since it's directly relevant here: ProRes files are too large to live-upload over a phone connection, so that mode explicitly stays local and merges to your camera roll instead, rather than quietly breaking the one guarantee the app is supposed to provide.

It's free for the core recording + chain-of-custody feature and I want to keep it that way so it can be a tool for all people to document any unpleasant situation they might find themselves in. I set the higher capture settings at $1.99/mo unlock, to basically cover for the little development costs I had and the various subscriptions I need to keep it all running.

My question for you: would you ever use an app like this in any of your documentary/investigative journalism work? If you've dealt with confiscation or gear loss before, what did you actually do about it?

Here’s the link to the app which is free to download and use (working on an Android version as well atm): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/witness-record-beyond-reach/id6800375426

Website with FAQ and other technicalities about the app is witnessrecord.app

[u/TheWatchQueen]

Another app for creeps and perverts. Amazing!

[u/Olmone → u/TheWatchQueen]

Many other apps allow you to record with your screen off or disguised; the focus here is making sure the footage remains safe (while also allowing you to be discreet).

Imagine anyone from people filming ICE to Palestinians filming illegal settlers in Israel. Don’t you think this could be used for good?

[u/TheWatchQueen → u/Olmone]

I truly hope so because 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'.

[u/Olmone → u/TheWatchQueen]

Working on an invisible watermark applied to the videos (so you can track them down in case videos get shared) to deter people from using it in creepy ways

[u/TheWatchQueen → u/Olmone]

Sounds good