Turn a spare iPhone into an ONVIF/RTSP security camera
View the Project on GitHub UnknownAlienTechnologies/vantage-public
Vantage — iPhone IP camera. Read this before you mount a phone and leave it running.
Version 1.0. Effective 24 August 2026. Applies to Vantage on iOS 17 and later.
What this document is. It explains the physical risks of running a phone as a continuous camera, and how to reduce them. It is drawn from Apple’s published documentation and peer-reviewed battery research, cited at the end so you can check it. It is not a waiver: nothing in it excludes or limits any right you have under the consumer law where you live, and nothing in it means you have accepted any risk. Before you start, read §6 — it lists the phones that must not be used for this at all.
How it fits with the licence terms. The physical instructions here are incorporated into
TERMS.md as conditions of use (see TERMS.md §5). Nothing here allocates risk, transfers
responsibility, or takes anything away. Where this document and TERMS.md appear to disagree about
anything — a physical instruction or a legal one — the reading more favourable to you is the one that
applies.
Vantage asks you to do something Apple’s own guidance tells you to avoid: run the camera continuously, with the screen on, plugged in, for days or months at a time. That is not an accident of how people use it — it is the documented way to use it, and it is written into the setup wizard and the support page. So the heat it produces is a designed-in consequence, not misuse, and it is described here rather than left for you to discover.
The honest core of this document is one sentence: running a phone this way will wear its battery out faster than normal use, and that is the expected outcome rather than a remote risk. Everything else here is either detail on that, or the much rarer path by which heat contributes to something worse.
This does not transfer responsibility to you. A warning is not a substitute for a safe design, and telling you about a hazard does not discharge the obligation to reduce it. Where a hazard here can be engineered out of the app, the fix belongs in the app; §11 lists the ones still outstanding, which are commitments on us rather than instructions to you.
Written in the same register as SECURITY.md: it explains the reasoning, gives the numbers where
numbers exist, and lists what is genuinely uncertain instead of smoothing it over.
Where to find this. Published at https://unknownalientechnologies.github.io/vantage-public/safety and in the app’s source repository at
Legal/SAFETY.md, in English only. At the time of writing the app does not yet link it and the store
listing does not yet summarise it — a notice nobody is shown is not doing its job, so both are in §11.
Everything below sorts into three rungs. They are stated together here because the difference between them is the part most often lost, in both directions:
The hazard alerts below follow the ANSI Z535 convention, which pairs a signal word with a stated consequence and a stated way to avoid it:
Every section that feeds the injury pathway carries a WARNING, including the two describing the app’s own ordinary operation (§1 and §2): sustained heat and sustained full charge are what produce the swelling in §5 and erode the margin described at the end of §6, so signalling them as mere property damage would understate them. Only §4 — capacity loss, with no route to injury — is a NOTICE. DANGER and CAUTION are not used: harm here is not imminent, and none of it is minor.
⚠ WARNING
Hazard. Vantage encodes video continuously in hardware, keeps the display awake, and runs with the phone plugged in. The system-on-chip, the display and the charging circuit all produce heat at the same time, indefinitely.
Consequence. The phone will run warm to hot for as long as it is streaming. Sustained heat permanently degrades the battery (§4), over time causes swelling (§5), and swelling is the point at which a wear problem becomes a burn-and-fire problem (§6). Higher resolutions and frame rates produce more heat; 4K is the hottest configuration the app offers and is noticeably hotter than 1080p.
How to avoid it. Use the lowest resolution and frame rate your recorder is happy with — these are the settings that decide how hot the phone runs. Use the Dim the screen control. Mount the phone where air can move around it. Take the case off. Keep it out of direct sunlight. See §10 for a full recommended configuration.
Apple states that iPhone and iPad “are designed for use where the ambient temperature is between 0º and 35º C (32º to 95º F)”, and names two of Vantage’s core behaviours — “using the camera for an extended period of time” and streaming high-quality video — among the things to avoid doing in hot conditions or direct sunlight. Vantage does not get an exemption from that guidance because it is useful. Keep the ambient temperature around the phone between 0 °C and 35 °C. Warmer than that is outside the range the manufacturer designed for, and the consequences below get materially worse.
What the app does about heat, stated precisely. It lowers the video bitrate when iOS reports thermal
pressure — to 60% of the target at the serious state and 35% at critical, never below a floor that
scales with the size of the picture: 500 kbps up to about a megapixel, proportionately higher above
that. That is a quality reduction with a modest thermal benefit. It does not reduce the frame rate or
resolution of the stream you configured, does not turn the display off, and never stops capture, and at
low resolutions the 500 kbps floor means the reduction is small or nil. So it is not a substitute for
the placement and settings choices in §10, and it is not what keeps the phone inside its limits — that
is iOS and the hardware (§8).
One exception, and it is the app’s only measure that gives up work rather than quality: the smaller
second stream, which the camera derives rather than you choosing it, halves its frame rate again at
serious and stops being encoded altogether at critical, coming back on its own when the phone
cools. It reads the temperature iOS reports rather than the value the override in §7 substitutes, so
that setting cannot keep it running.
⚠ WARNING
Hazard. The recommended way to run Vantage keeps the phone plugged in permanently, so the battery sits at or near 100% charge while it is warm. Heat and high state of charge each accelerate battery ageing, and they compound.
Consequence. Permanent, unrecoverable loss of battery capacity — faster than the same phone would lose it sitting in a drawer or in a pocket. Apple states plainly that “using an iOS or iPadOS device in very hot conditions can permanently shorten battery life”, that ambient temperatures above 35 °C “can permanently damage battery capacity”, and that “charging the device in high ambient temperatures can damage it further”. Beyond capacity loss, this is the specific condition that drives the swelling in §5 and, over a long period, the loss of safety margin described at the end of §6.
How to avoid it. You cannot avoid it entirely — the app needs mains power. You can reduce it: keep the phone cool and ventilated, and use a charge limit if your phone has one. Apple’s user-selectable 80% charge limit (Settings → Battery → Charging) exists only on iPhone 15 and later, so on the older phone this app is aimed at it will usually not be there, and there is no equivalent. Optimised Battery Charging is not a charge limit and does nothing for a phone that is never unplugged. If you cannot set a limit, temperature is the only lever you have left, which makes §3 matter more rather than less.
The mechanism, for anyone who wants to check the reasoning. The dominant ageing process in a phone that is rarely discharged is calendar ageing: the passivation layer on the anode keeps growing, consuming lithium and electrolyte. Its rate follows an Arrhenius temperature dependence, and with the activation energies measured for these cells that works out at roughly a doubling of the ageing rate for every 10 °C across the range a phone actually sees. Independently, a low anode potential — which is what a full battery means — accelerates the same process, and published storage studies find high temperature and high state of charge acting together rather than merely adding up.
So the specific condition this app creates, hot and full and continuously, is the worst of the common combinations for battery life. That is not a reason not to use the app. It is a reason to choose the phone accordingly and to expect the outcome.
Note also that Apple’s cycle-count ratings — designed to retain 80% of original capacity at 500 complete charge cycles for iPhone 14 and earlier, 1000 cycles for iPhone 15 models — describe cycling, not this. A Vantage phone accumulates few cycles and a great deal of hot calendar time, so those figures are not a useful prediction of how long its battery will last.
⚠ WARNING
Hazard. Anything that traps heat around a charging, encoding phone — a thick or insulating case, a sealed enclosure or junction box, bedding or soft furnishings, a car dashboard, direct sunlight through glass — raises its internal temperature well beyond what the same phone would reach in open air.
Consequence. Rapid and permanent battery capacity loss; over time, swelling (§5); and in combination with a damaged, degraded or non-genuine battery, a route towards venting, smoke or fire (§6). Trapped heat is the single factor most under your control and the one that changes the outcome most.
How to avoid it. Mount the phone in open air with clearance on the back. Remove the case, or use one that does not cover the back — Apple’s own guidance is that if the device gets hot while charging, take it out of its case. Do not put a Vantage phone in a sealed enclosure, a wall box, a soft bag, bedding, or under anything. Do not mount it in direct sunlight or behind glass in sunlight. Do not use a car dashboard or a windscreen mount: an unventilated car interior in the sun goes far above 35 °C on its own, before the phone adds anything. Weatherproof outdoor enclosures are especially bad, because sealing against water also seals against airflow.
Two related points on siting, both easy to get wrong:
NOTICE
Hazard. Continuous hot, fully charged operation consumes battery capacity. This is wear, not a malfunction, and it is permanent.
Consequence. The phone will hold less charge, and eventually much less, than it would have. No injury pathway — this rung of the ladder is equipment damage only. The injury pathway starts at §5.
How to avoid it. You cannot, while running the app. You can choose which phone bears it.
If the phone’s battery life matters to you, use a different phone. If it is a spare you still expect to travel with, or one you plan to sell or trade in, or one that belongs to somebody else, this is the wrong use for it. Choose the device on that basis.
That is a description of what happens, not an allocation of responsibility, and reading it does not mean you have accepted anything — under the law of many countries, including the UK (Consumer Rights Act 2015 s 65(2)), a person is not taken to have voluntarily accepted a risk merely because they agreed to or knew about a term or a notice.
Nor does this notice decide whether any particular outcome is a quality or durability failure. Durability is expressly part of the statutory quality standard in the UK (CRA 2015 s 34(3)) and in Australia, and your rights against Apple under its own hardware warranty or AppleCare are not ours to describe. If you think your phone has degraded beyond what is described here, or that Vantage has damaged it, tell us at §12, which also says what you are entitled to.
⚠ WARNING
Hazard. Prolonged hot, high-charge operation causes gas generation and internal expansion in a lithium-ion cell. A swelling battery pushes the phone apart from the inside.
Consequence. A swollen cell has already lost mechanical integrity. Continued use, continued charging, or any pressure or puncture can lead to leakage of corrosive electrolyte, venting, smoke or fire, and injury. Swelling is the escalation that turns a wear problem into a safety problem.
How to avoid it — and what to do. Look at the phone from time to time. Stop immediately if the back or the screen is lifting, a gap has opened at the seam, the display is bulging or has a raised area, the phone rocks when placed face-up on a flat surface, the case no longer fits, or the phone smells odd or is much hotter than usual for the same settings. If any of that is true: stop the app, unplug it, do not charge it again, do not press on the swelling and do not puncture or bend the device, move it away from anything flammable, and take it to Apple or an Apple Authorised Service Provider. Apple’s own instruction is that if you suspect damage to the device or the battery you should discontinue use, “as it may cause overheating or injury”.
Do not put a swollen phone back into service as a camera at any resolution, and do not store it in a drawer to deal with later.
Read this section before you choose a phone, not after. It is written as a set of conditions on the phone, and one of them is likely to bite: the phone this app is marketed for is an old spare, and an old spare is exactly the phone most likely to have a degraded or third-party-replaced battery. If your phone does not pass the checks below, the answer is a different phone, not lower settings.
⚠ WARNING
Hazard. A lithium-ion cell can enter self-sustaining exothermic breakdown — thermal runaway — resulting in venting, smoke, fire and, in confined conditions, rupture.
Consequence. Fire, burns, smoke inhalation, property damage, death.
How to avoid it. Do not run Vantage on a phone whose battery is damaged, swollen, previously heat-damaged, or of unknown origin. Do not use a phone with a non-genuine replacement battery, or one replaced by anyone other than Apple or an Apple Authorised Service Provider. Check Settings → General → About and Settings → Battery for any message that iOS cannot verify a genuine Apple battery, and if you see one, use a different phone. Use a genuine or MFi-certified charger and cable. Do not use a phone with cracked glass, water damage, or a history of being dropped hard. Keep the phone away from flammable material. Follow §3 on ventilation, which is what keeps the phone far from the temperatures that matter here.
Being accurate about how likely this is, because an overstated warning is both dishonest and less useful. In a new, healthy cell the exothermic chemistry that precedes runaway typically begins somewhere around 90–120 °C inside the cell, and the self-sustaining stage typically needs 130–180 °C. Those are typical figures with a wide spread, not thresholds: reported onset temperatures run considerably lower for some chemistries, states of charge and cell histories, and in a cell that has been aged hot they fall further — see below. They are also cell-internal temperatures, which are higher than anything you can feel from outside.
Against that, iOS pauses charging, dims the display, throttles the processor, shows a temperature warning screen and finally shuts the phone down, all well before those temperatures (§8). The realistic outcomes of this use pattern are the ones in §4 and §5 — capacity loss, then possibly swelling — and the fire pathway in practice needs a second, separate cause: an internal short from a manufacturing defect, physical damage from a drop or a crush, a cell that has been overcharged or over-discharged, or a counterfeit or badly installed replacement cell that lacks the protection circuitry and the abuse testing a genuine pack has passed. That is why this section is written as eligibility conditions for the phone rather than as a temperature limit.
We cannot tell you how much margin your installation has, because we have not measured any. None of the temperatures in this document were measured on a Vantage installation — they are Apple’s design figures and published cell research (§11). So do not read the paragraph above as a reassurance about your phone: assume no margin, and treat §3 as the thing that creates it.
And the margin shrinks. Laboratory work on deliberately heat-aged cells finds that sustained high-temperature ageing measurably lowers the temperature at which self-heating and runaway begin, so a cell aged hot for a year has less margin than a new one. That erosion is produced by the app’s normal operation rather than by misuse, and it is the strongest reason to take §3 and §5 seriously rather than treating capacity loss as the whole story.
If a phone does vent, smoke or catch fire: get everyone away from it and call the emergency services. Do not breathe the smoke — a venting cell produces toxic gas as well as heat. Then follow your own national fire service’s guidance, which is the authority here; this notice deliberately does not give further instructions, because we could not verify more detailed wording against a fire authority or a manufacturer, and an unsourced instruction about a fire is worse than none (§11).
⚠ WARNING
Hazard. With Ignore temperature switched on (Settings → Performance), Vantage substitutes a “cool” reading for the phone’s real thermal state at the
fairandseriouslevels. Its own bitrate reduction is therefore disabled through those states, and the encoder is held at your chosen quality while the phone is hot, for as long as it stays hot. Atcriticalthe reduction always applies: that floor is not affected by this setting and cannot be switched off.Consequence. The phone runs hotter for longer than it otherwise would, which accelerates everything in §4, brings §5 closer, and over a long period contributes to the margin erosion described at the end of §6.
How to avoid it. Leave it off. If you switch it on, keep the phone somewhere well ventilated and out of the sun, check it more often for swelling, and switch it off if you cannot follow §3. It is not needed for normal use, and turning it off is always permitted regardless of tier.
How much this matters, stated honestly rather than dramatically. The override removes the only thing the app itself does about heat, so it makes a hot phone hotter for longer. But what it removes is a bitrate reduction, and encoder power scales with pixel rate rather than bit rate: resolution and frame rate are the settings that decide how hot the phone runs, and the reduction this setting defeats never touches either of them at any temperature. 4K30 is roughly twenty times the pixel rate of the lowest setting the app offers. At low resolutions the 500 kbps floor can mean the override changes almost nothing. So it is the most consequential setting you can change without changing the picture — and choosing a lower resolution and frame rate matters more.
Three further facts about this setting, because each affects whether you can rely on what you see:
It can be set from your network, and switching it on in the app now asks first. Any device holding the camera’s password — which is the one credential for the recorder, the web page and the API alike — can enable it over the local HTTP API without touching the phone and without any confirmation. In the app it cannot be switched on without a dialog stating the battery and fire consequence. So restrict the password to devices you control: it is something that can make the phone hotter. Enabling over the API being unconfirmed remains a gap, listed in §11.
How to check whether it is on. Open Settings in the app and read the toggle: it re-reads the
live value from the camera every time that screen appears, including a change made over the API
while you were elsewhere in the app. It does not update while you are already looking at it, so if
something may have changed it with that screen open, close it and open it again. Do not tap the
toggle to confirm it is off — tapping it turns it on. You can also fetch /api/state with your
password and read thermal.isThrottlingIgnored. What there is still no way to see is the state
without opening one of those two: nothing on the camera screen says the override is on, which is
the §11 item to close next.
Vantage adjusts one thing: the bitrate of its own video encoder. No setting in the app — including Ignore temperature — changes any of the following, which are iOS and hardware behaviour:
Two qualifications, so this is not read as more comfort than it is. Some of the above does bear on long-term capacity, not only on immediate safety: Apple says charge pausing “helps preserve your battery’s long-term health”, and that “[s]oftware may limit charging above 80% when the recommended battery temperatures are exceeded”, which mitigates part of the hot-and-full mechanism in §2. But that is a limit on charging, not a limit on how hot the phone runs, and it will not prevent the wear in §4.
The practical consequence: switching off the app’s bitrate reduction does not disable any iOS or hardware protection. It does make the app a larger and more continuous heat source, which is what §7 is about.
⚠ WARNING
Hazard. A mounted phone that comes loose falls. A permanently connected charging cable is a trip, pull and abrasion hazard, and a damaged or uncertified charger is an electrical and fire hazard.
Consequence. Injury from a falling device, particularly to anyone below it; damage to the phone and to its battery, which brings §5 and §6 into play; electric shock or fire from a damaged cable or a non-compliant power adapter.
How to avoid it. Mount to a solid surface with fixings rated well above the weight, and check the mount periodically — heat and vibration loosen adhesive mounts in particular. Do not mount over a bed, a cot, a bath, a walkway or a work area. Use a genuine Apple or MFi-certified charger and cable; Apple warns that adapters not meeting safety standards “could pose a risk of death or injury”. Route the cable so it cannot be tripped over, pulled, pinched, kinked at the connector, crushed by a window or a door, or run under carpet. Replace any cable with damaged insulation or a hot connector. Keep phone, cable and adapter in a well-ventilated place.
Vantage is a single-purpose camera feed for non-critical monitoring on your own network, and it inherits the limits of the phone it runs on. It is not a monitored alarm, not a fire or smoke detection system, not a medical or baby monitoring device, and not suitable for anything where a failure could cause injury, loss, or a missed emergency. That is true regardless of how you found the app or what the store listing surfaced it for.
The failure modes are ordinary and expected, not hypothetical: iOS revokes the camera if the app leaves the foreground, so a phone call, a notification tap or an iOS update ends the stream; iOS can shut capture down for heat; the network can drop; the phone can restart. On-phone recording does not stop when the disk fills — it deletes its own oldest clips to stay inside its storage budget and to leave 2 GB free, so your retention window can be far shorter than you expect, and on the free tier it is one hour whatever the settings say. The app provides no guaranteed uptime and no guarantee that any particular moment is recorded. If something matters enough that missing it would cause harm or a significant loss, use equipment built and certified for that purpose, and keep independent recording.
The intended use is an unattended phone, so the safety instructions have to survive nobody being there. That means the conditions in §3 must be permanently true rather than true when you set it up.
Do not rely on the app’s on-screen indicators, even though they are better than they were. The “Hot” and “Too hot” warnings now stay visible while the screen is dimmed, which is the mode this app recommends for continuous running, and the Diagnostics thermal line no longer contradicts the override (§11). What they cannot do is tell you what temperature the phone has actually reached, or anything at all about the battery, the mount or the cable — and nothing on screen says whether the override in §7 is on. The only trustworthy check is a physical one. Look at the phone in person from time to time, and at least monthly: feel whether it is hotter than it used to be at the same settings, look at the seams and the screen for the signs in §5, check the mount and the cable. Nothing here makes that inspection a condition of anything.
The app can notify you, and that is not supervision. If the camera stops filming, the picture freezes, recording stops for good, or the servers stop listening, and the condition lasts about a minute, the app posts a notification on the camera phone itself. It is worth having — it timestamps the failure, so “it stopped some time in the last three days” becomes “it stopped at 02:14” — and it is worth being blunt about what it is not. It appears on that phone only; there is no service behind it that could reach another device. It requires the app to be running, so the failures that end with the app terminated, the phone rebooted, the battery flat or the phone powered off are precisely the ones that notify nobody. It says nothing about temperature, swelling or the mount. Silence from it is not evidence that anything is well, and it does not replace a single line of §3 or of the inspection above.
A phone running Vantage should be sited on the assumption that it will one day be the thing that goes wrong: not on or near anything flammable, not the only smoke detection in the room, and within reach of a working smoke alarm rather than in a loft or a cupboard where a problem would go unnoticed.
Whoever installs this is usually not the only person at risk from it, and the others never read this
notice. Tell whoever else lives or works in the room what the phone is, that it is permanently
powered, and what to do if it swells, smells odd or gets much hotter than usual — unplug it if it is
safe to do so, do not press on it, and do not pick it up if it is venting or smoking (§5, §6). Do not
mount a Vantage phone somewhere a child can reach it, and do not mount it in premises you do not
control, or in a shared or rented space, without the occupier’s agreement. Nothing in this notice or
in TERMS.md affects the rights of somebody who is harmed by the phone and never agreed to either
document — under EU product liability rules, for example, the right to compensation belongs to “any
natural person who suffers damage caused by a defective product” (Directive (EU) 2024/2853, Art 5(1)).
If the aim is to keep the phone as cool as it can be while still being useful:
Placement
In the app, in order of how much difference each makes to heat:
In iOS
Listed in the same spirit as SECURITY.md. These are things wrong with the app or with how this
notice reaches you, and they are our job to fix. They are recorded here because a warning that
quietly depends on a display that is wrong is worse than no warning — not to shift the consequences on
to you.
Design and behaviour
critical is
now unconditional — the override cannot reach past that state — and the derived second stream halves
its rate at serious and stops at critical (§1). But nothing pauses capture or steps the main
stream’s frame rate or resolution down, however long critical persists, in any tier. Pausing
capture with an on-screen reason at sustained critical is the remaining fix.Displays
serious and critical even when Ignore
temperature had disabled that reduction. It now says the quality is being held at serious, and
reports the reduction at critical, where the override has no effect. It still asserts “reduced”
from the thermal state rather than from the bitrate actually applied, so at 480p, where the floor
means nothing was reduced, it overstates the protection.Delivery of this notice
Things we do not know
Stop using the phone, unplug it, and follow §5 if there is any sign of swelling. Then tell us, so it can be looked at and fixed for everybody.
What you are entitled to. Reporting a problem is not a favour to us, and it is not the same thing
as making a claim. If Vantage has damaged your phone or your recordings, TERMS.md §14 sets out what
we will do. In the United Kingdom that is your right under section 46 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015:
repair with any necessary costs borne by us, or an appropriate payment made within 14 days of us
accepting that you are entitled to it, with no fee charged to you — and we apply the same basis
everywhere else as a matter of policy. In Australia and New Zealand the statutory consumer guarantees
apply automatically and cannot be excluded by anything in this notice or in TERMS.md. In the EU and
the UK, product liability rights are not ours to limit either. Apple, separately, refunds the price of
the Vantage Pro purchase. None of that depends on you having read this document.
Email: joshualipovic@gmail.com Postal: Joshua Joseph Lipovic, PO Box 46, Douglas Park NSW 2565, Australia Telephone: +61 474 779 848
Please include the phone model, its iOS version, the app version, the resolution, frame rate and bitrate you were running, whether Ignore temperature was on, how the phone was mounted and whether it was enclosed or in sun, and what happened. Photographs help. Reports of overheating, swelling or any injury are treated as a priority, and we would rather hear about a phone that got worryingly hot than not.
The factual claims above rest on the following, so they can be checked rather than taken on trust:
Where a claim in this document is not supported by one of the above, it is flagged in §11 or marked UNVERIFIED above. The legal references are cited so you can check them; they are not legal advice.
Again, and to be clear: this is safety information and it is not a waiver. Nothing in it excludes or
limits any right you have, and nothing in it means you have accepted any risk. Wherever Vantage is
bought, the mandatory consumer-protection and product-liability law of the country you live in applies
to it, whatever governing law TERMS.md names.