Whenever you begin a screen recording on your iPhone or iPad with the handy Control Center shortcut in iOS 11, your device displays a red indicator in the Status Bar to remind you that a screen recording is in progress.
For those who’d rather not see a red indicator in their recordings at all, a new free jailbreak tweak called SilentRecorder by iOS developer Kiran Patil is now available in Cydia that can help.
The two primary arguments for hiding the screen recording indicator are to make it imperceptible to others around you that you’re recording your display and to hide the unsightly red indicator from your screen recording video(s) to make the result more aesthetically-acceptable.
Notably, the screen recording indicator is more pronounced on non-iPhone X handsets than on the iPhone X because it takes up the entire span of the Status Bar. In contrast, iPhone X users only put up with a subtle indicator that appears over the digital clock:
Given the circumstances, SilentRecorder provides a great way to eliminate a pain point for non-iPhone X users. iPhone X users can certainly enjoy the benefits as well, despite how restrained the indicator already is out of the box.
When you install SilentRecorder, you’ll also find a slew of new options in the Settings app:
Here, you can:
- Hide the recording indicator on demand
- Hide the recording icon from Control Center
- Stop screen recording directly from the preference pane
- Hide the location indicator from the Status Bar
- Hide the green active call indicator from the Status Bar
The developer includes a Respring button at the bottom of the preference pane for saving any changes you make to the settings.
The only issue I have with SilentRecorder is that the lack of an indicator makes it easier to forget that you’re recording your display. If you would happen to forget, then you could inadvertently fill your iPhone’s limited storage space in no time at all.
If you want to try SilentRecorder out for yourself, then you can download it for free from Cydia’s BigBoss repository. The tweak works on all jailbroken iOS 11 devices, and it seems that the developer will be adding support for hiding the Personal Hotspot indicator in a future update.
What do you think about hiding these indicators during live display recording? Let us know in the comments below.