Building CleanCam for iOS 6 in 2020

Do you have an old, jailbroken, iPhone?
Does the iPhone’s camera look better than your webcam?
Do you have a Dock-HDMI adaptor and HDMI capture device?
Are you irrationally loyal to a Third Rail battery case, USB sync, and the user interface of iTunes 10 and refuse to upgrade? (Maybe that’s just me.)

Today I’m introducing CleanCam for iOS 6!
http://peterburk.free.fr/CleanCam.zip

All it does is show the video from the rear camera on the iPhone screen. But it does it as “clean HDMI”, without extra buttons. This way, DisplayOut can share the iPhone screen over HDMI, and you can use the iPhone as a webcam.

Installation instructions:

1. Get an old iPhone 4 or 4S. Maybe iPod touch too. These can be as cheap as $2 from a scrapyard, in my experience!
2. Downgrade to iOS 6.1.3 using OdysseusOTA. This needs a Mac, not a VM, natively running Mac OS 10.8.
3. Jailbreak using p0sixspwn
4. Install the (included) DisplayOut deb using Cydia AutoInstall, or iFile.
5. Install the (included) AppSync deb to allow installing unsigned apps.
6. Add the CleanCam.ipa file to iTunes
7. Plug in the iPhone, select it in iTunes, choose the Apps menu, tick CleanCam, and press Sync.
8. Run CleanCam on the phone, plug in the Dock-HDMI and HDMI-USB adaptors, and enjoy your new webcam!

Development instructions:

If you’re shocked that similar apps cost $3.99 on the App Store, want to make your own legacy apps, or are just a masochist, this is how I built the app! Setting everything up took about a day (lunchtime to 2 am), so don’t start this unless you’ve got plenty of time.

You’ll need an old Mac running 10.8.5 and XCode 5. This is my multi-boot MacBook Pro 2007!

You need to change the system date just to install XCode

1. Get a Mac running Mac OS 10.8.5. Thankfully I have a MacBook Pro 2007 with multi-boot WinXP, Tiny7, Ubuntu, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, and 10.11. Setting up those partitions is a whole other story!
2. Download and install XCode 5.1.1.
3. “Install additional required components” will fail.
4. Change the system date to 2013.
5. Try again, the components will install this time.
6. Download and install the iOS 6 SDK.
7. Follow Alex Whittemore’s excellent guide to set up self-signing.
8. Download an old version of TextWrangler if you don’t want to use vi.
9. Plug in the iPhone, and in XCode’s Organizer window, click “Use for development”.
10. Get a sample project e.g. Face Recognition.
11. Do all the remaining steps in Alex Whittemore’s guide to make that project self-sign with Python as a Build Stage.
12. Test it using Build and Run!
13. The app would crash when launched from XCode, but worked when I relaunched it from the home screen of the phone itself.
14. To build an IPA, first make an xcarchive using Product > Archive
15. Convert the xcarchive to an IPA.
16. …
17. Profit! (or non-profit, because honestly, this is legacy anyway)

Here’s the source, if you want it.
http://peterburk.free.fr/CleanCamSource.zip

I hope this helps someone, and encourages people that despite iPhones being so locked-down these days, the legacy jailbreaking community does still exist, and some of these old devices are more powerful than you’d think. If you find one, recycle it! And let me know if you’d like the IPAs for any of the 410 apps or 148 jailbreak debs that I continue to use to this day.