How to Screen Record on an iPhone

Jun 24, 2021

Over 113 million smartphone users in the United States use iPhones. This makes up for close to 47% of smartphone users (just a little less than half). That's a lot of people using iPhones, and a majority of people using iPhones don't use their iPhones to their full capacities. iPhones have several features iPhone users often overlook, forget about, or don't know their phone has in the first place.

Screen recording is one of the many iPhone features iPhone users often forget about. Most iPhone users know how to take screenshots, but forget that the even handier screen recording tool is right at their fingertips. Screen recording also has an extra feature that is often not utilized either.

If you have never used the screen recording tool to record your iPhone screen as you game, scroll through a hilarious texting conversation, or show a tech issue as it is occurring, you should. I use it often when struggling to get through a finicky level or boss during my many mobile gaming adventures and to show others how to do fun, techy stuff like screen recording!

In this guide, I'm going to take you step-by-step through the screen recording process. If you need to record a phone call on your iPhone, check out my guide, How to Record a Phone Call on an iPhone.

Note: this guide was done with iOS 14 and later; however, the process has not changed much over the years based on iOS versions. The process is dependent on the type of iPhone you have, because the way to access the control center is different with phones that use Touch ID versus Face ID.

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Before beginning, you will want to make sure that your settings are set up so that you can access the screen recording button in the control center. If you have already noticed the screen recording button in the control center, you can skip over this step. To add the screen recording button to your personalized control center, follow the steps below:

Navigate to the home screen.
Find the "settings" application and click on it.
Navigate to the "control center."
Select "more controls." If you have iOS 13 or earlier, it will have the "customize controls" options instead.
Click the add button "+" next to "screen recording."

Now, you can begin screen recording effortlessly! If there is a remove button "-", that just means you already have that option in the control center.

First things first, unlock your iPhone! Once your iPhone is unlocked you can follow the steps below to become a screen recording pro:

Here, you have two options:

You can start by going to your home screen if you are trying to go step-by-step and give someone instructions, like I am here, or...
You can start at the screen your on. So, if you are in-game, you can stay put and start recording in-game.

This decision is really based on why you are screen recording and what will be better for the viewer.

Here is where things speed up. To screen record, we will be using the control center. Here's how:

Open the control center.

If you have an iPhone 10 or later, you do this by swiping down from the upper right-hand corner of the iPhone, but if you have an iPhone 8 or earlier, you will be swiping up from the bottom of your iPhone screen.

To screen record, we will be using the screen recording button, but there are two options to screen record (with or without a microphone), so here's how to screen record without a microphone:

With option one, you will click the screen recording button.
A three-second timer will appear, giving you that time to get where you need to be and start recording.

If you want to be able to talk and record via your microphone (this is great for tutorials), then you will want to go about the screen recording process a little differently. Here's how:

Press and hold the screen recording button for a few seconds.
Click the microphone button that appears (by default this option is off).

You will know the mic is on because it will be red and say "Microphone On" below the button.

Once you have captured what you were hoping to, it's time to stop the screen recording process. Here's how to get it done:

In the upper left-hand corner of your iPhone, you will see a red status bar. Click it.

A dialogue box will pop up, and you can then click "stop" to end the screen recording.

The recording will be saved to your photo library. That's it! You've used the screen recording feature. Next: Learn about 30 amazing things you can do on your iPhone.

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Christina (139)

Jul 2, 2021

1 minute

Recording calls often involves downloading a third-party app, spending unnecessary money, and can be a bit of a hassle if you've never done it before and don't know where to start.