Turning a Decommissioned iPhone into a UniFi Protect Camera Friday, 15 August 2025
I’ve recently become a Ubiquiti UniFi disciple, including replacing our builder-basic doorbell from 1998 with Ubituiti G4 Doorbell Pro. This has brought me into the UniFi Protect ecosystem.
Protect is absolutely designed to work with UniFi cameras — as one would expect — but they do have some basic support for third-party cameras that support ONVIF.
It occurred to me that I have a small collection of minicomputers in the house that I’m not using anymore. Further, those minicomputers all have cameras built-in. So that got me thinking, can I use one of these old iPhones as a third-party camera in Protect?
My first step was to see if I could find an app on the App Store that natively supports streaming via ONVIF. If one exists, I couldn’t find it.
However, while researching how to handle this, it became apparent that, to my limited understanding, ONVIF is more of a handshaking protocol. When it comes to video streaming, the assumption is that RTSP will handle the actual streaming.
Which got me wondering if I could do some combination of
RTSP app → some sort of ONVIF wrapper/proxy → Protect
In principle, that should work.
I started by casting about to find an app that would stream RTSP from the phone. I found a couple, but the one that seemed to work best for me is IP Camera Lite. It’s not intuitive, but it has a free tier for me to test with, and once I got my head around how the app works, it was reasonably simple.
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