A phone remote for your Meta Quest's built-in recorder. Start and stop captures with one big button, switch resolution, ratio, and format on the fly, and pull mixed-reality footage straight to your phone. Hands-free, anywhere, no PC.
Note: Independent community project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Meta. "Meta", "Quest", and "Meta Quest" are trademarks of Meta Platforms, Inc. The app only sends standard
adb shellcommands to a headset you own. It bundles no Meta code.
I create a lot of mixed-reality / passthrough content on the Quest. As an interaction designer I work mostly with my hands, not the controllers, which makes recording a pain:
- Starting and stopping a capture in-headset is friction. You need a controller shortcut, a voice command, or you dive into a menu and leave your experience. Repeat that for every take and it kills the flow, especially when you're shooting several sequences.
- Changing the capture format means more menu-diving. Resolution, aspect ratio, which eye (left / right / both): all buried in settings, all friction between you and the shot.
Quest Capture Remote moves all of that onto a phone sitting next to you, easy to see in passthrough. One job, done well:
- One big red button to start and stop recording, nothing else in the way.
- Capture options in one place: aspect ratio, resolution, compression (bitrate), and frame rate, switchable in a tap.
- Remote control of the whole flow: stop, restart, and record take after take without breaking immersion.
- Hands-free recording from your phone while you stay in the experience.
- Multiple takes, all listed on the phone.
- Download clips to your phone to review, keep a copy, and free up headset storage. Your phone becomes the footage drive.
- Footage built for a serious edit: full control of resolution, ratio, and compression so the source holds up in a real cut, whether it's a trailer, a game demo, or a polished content piece.
- Shoot anywhere: re-enable ADB over Wi-Fi on the spot and you're recording with pro-grade settings in a park, a garden, wherever. No PC, no desk.
- Extra controls: temporarily disable the proximity sensor and the Guardian boundary while recording.
- Content creators filming VR or mixed reality who want clean, repeatable captures.
- Developers demoing their games or cutting trailers, who need to remote-control recording and pick the right resolution for a serious edit.
The phone talks to the headset over wireless ADB (Android Debug Bridge over Wi-Fi) and drives the
Quest's built-in capture service the same way Meta's own desktop tools do, all from the shell user,
with nothing installed on the headset. It scans your network for the Quest, applies your capture
settings, starts/stops the internal recorder, then lists and downloads the clips to your gallery.
- A Meta Quest headset (developed and tested on Quest 3) with wireless debugging enabled.
- An Android phone on the same Wi-Fi network as the headset.
- Download the latest
Quest-Capture-Remote-*.apkfrom the Releases page. - On your phone, allow installing from unknown sources, then open the APK to install.
- Enable wireless ADB on the Quest (the app's "ADB not enabled?" screen walks you through it, including a one-time USB-C enable), open the app, and tap Find and connect to Quest 3.
On first connection, accept the debugging prompt inside the headset ("Always allow").
Important: after a Quest reboot, wireless debugging turns off and must be re-enabled.
Requires JDK 17 and the Android SDK.
./gradlew assembleDebug # Windows: gradlew.bat assembleDebugThe APK is produced at app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk.
The release build type leaves R8/minify off on purpose: shrinking the app made the wireless-ADB connection unreliable on real hardware, and a rock-solid connection matters more than a smaller APK.
- Kotlin + Jetpack Compose (Material 3)
- dadb for ADB-over-TCP
- Minimum Android 10 (API 29)
- dadb by mobile.dev, licensed under Apache 2.0, handles the ADB-over-TCP connection to the headset.
- A few interface icons come from Google Material Symbols, licensed under Apache 2.0.
- App icon, illustrations, and visual design by Greg Madison.
MIT © 2026 Greg Madison