We run Frigate. Self-hosted, on a $250 mini PC, behind Tailscale, with a Coral TPU and ten Reolink cameras. It works perfectly when we’re at a laptop.
On the phone, every option is broken in a different way.
The Frigate web UI
Frigate ships an excellent web UI. On a desktop browser, it is the right answer for 90% of what you need. On a phone, it stops being the right answer the moment you want to watch a 4K H.265 stream.
Mobile browsers don’t decode H.265 reliably. Even though every modern phone has hardware HEVC in its silicon, mobile browsers don’t always expose it through the <video> tag — patent licensing math being what it is. Firefox refuses on principle. Chrome on Android only started shipping HEVC in late 2022 and still varies by device. Safari handles it on iOS, but you are still in a browser tab when you wanted an app. So you end up either re-encoding on the server (CPU expensive, latency bad) or watching a slideshow.
The third-party companion apps
Look at the Play Store right now and you find a small handful of “Frigate companion” apps. Three patterns repeat.
The vendor-cloud lock-in. “Self-hosted Frigate companion!” — except the push notifications go through someone else’s server, and the app calls home to validate your subscription, and your camera URLs end up in a Firebase document that is one breach away from public. Self-hosted means self-hosted. The whole stack should be on your hardware.
The codec wall. App connects to Frigate, lists your cameras, opens a stream, and shows a black square because it is relying on the system codec the manufacturer cheaped out on. No native decode path, no fallback, no acknowledgment that anything went wrong. Works fine on the developer’s Pixel; broken on yours.
The price-to-feature inversion. $50 a year for an app that does less than the free web UI. Sometimes more than the cost of the camera the app talks to.
What ViewPane is, in 30 seconds
- Native H.265 decode on both Android and iOS. Hardware HEVC has been in iPhone silicon since the 6s and in mainstream Android SoCs since Lollipop — ViewPane hands the stream straight to that hardware. Full 4K, full frame rate, no re-encode on the server.
- Zero cloud, zero telemetry. The app talks to your Frigate server. Full stop. No analytics SDK. No vendor backend. Even the push notifications go through a relay container you host.
- Tailscale-native remote access. No port-forwarding, no dynamic DNS, nothing on
:5000exposed to the public internet. If you already run Tailscale, ViewPane finds your Frigate over MagicDNS and the entire transport is encrypted end-to-end. - $9.99 a year for Pro — that’s two coffees. Free is real: one server, multi-camera grid, native H.265, fullscreen + pinch-zoom, last 20 events, App Lock, LAN + Tailscale. Pro adds MQTT push notifications, full event history with filters, multi-server, clip playback + download, and Live Wall. Cancel any time.
If you are happy with the browser, the browser is fine. We mean that. The pricing page says it directly. The audience here is people who want a phone-first surface for Frigate without handing camera feeds to a cloud to make it work.
What it is not
It is not a Frigate replacement. Frigate is the brain — the detection engine, the recording layer, the clip storage, the zones, the masks, the Coral pipeline. ViewPane is a phone-shaped window into a Frigate install you already trust.
It is not a SaaS. There is no account to make. The app stores your server URL in your phone’s secure enclave. Uninstall the app and nothing about you survives anywhere — there is nothing to survive.
It is not trying to be everything. Live Wall (multi-camera ~1fps grid), custom multi-camera layouts, broader event filters — those are on the roadmap. None of them are blocking the v1 launch.
What is next
Closed beta is running now. v1 ships once the IAP gate is in and the store-listing prep is done. If you run Frigate and want this on your phone — get on the launch list and you will get the link the day it goes live. One email, then silence.
And if you do go Pro: $9.99 a year is two coffees. Buy me two coffees a year and we keep ViewPane in its best shape — bug fixes shipping, the app keeping up with Frigate releases, the privacy promise staying kept. That is the deal.