Alfred turns unused smartphones into surveillance cams

Do you have an unused Android smartphone? It might be yesterday’s model, but Alfred can give it new life, turning the device into your very own home surveillance camera.

Setup starts by running Alfred on the phone you’ll be using as a monitor. Configure it as the camera, and log in with your Google account.

Now run Alfred on another Android phone, set it as a viewer, log in with the same Google account, and you’re done.

At a minimum you can watch the feed, switch between the front and rear cameras, maybe take snapshots.

The app supports multiple cameras and viewers, enabling several people to monitor the same location.

Alfred provides two-way audio, too. You can hear what’s going on, and join in, anything from singing to your baby to shouting at intruders.

No time to monitor the feed? No problem, Alfred’s simple motion detection system will send you a notification whenever something happens.

Alfred’s ads can be annoying, and there are some reports of the connection being lost for no apparent reason. But the system is still being actively developed, and in our experience Alfred is a fun app with a good feature set which mostly works very well.