Sometimes if you are doing a live training with a customer, you may need to share your phone screen on your mac. This is particularly helpful if you develop websites for clients and want to show them the experience on your phone.
If you have an iPhone and a Macintosh computer with Quicktime, it’s actually easy to do. You phone has to be tethered to the computer with your USB Lightning cable.
Steps to Display your iPhone on the computer screen.
- Connect your iPhone to the computer via your USB Lightning cable.
- From your Launchpad, open QuickTime player.
- In the QuickTime menu, click on File > New Movie Recording.
- Next to the Record button there is a down arrow. Click on this and select your iPhone instead of the default Facetime camera. See Image below.
- This will now display your iPhone screen on your Mac. You can then share your screen on a Zoom call to show it to a client, or you can click the record button and record your iPhone screen.
If you’re building websites for clients, especially online learning platforms, showing them how it looks on your phone is helpful.
Complete Transcript of How to Share an iPhone Screen on a Mac
(00:01)
Hey everybody, it’s Kim Shivler. Welcome! In today’s lesson, I’m going to actually show you how to use QuickTime if you’re on a Mac to share your phone screen with a customer. So when I’m doing training or if I want to show someone their website, what it looks like on the phone, a lot of times I know in your browser there’s a, within your web development area in WordPress, you might be able to click on things to show the different views. But believe me, there’s nothing like actually looking at it on a phone or tablet or different device. So if you’re building websites for people and you want to show them what it looks like on the phone or you’re doing web training like I do, sometimes it’s just really helpful to show them the actual screen on the phone. Let me show you how to do that. Again, we’re on a Mac and we’re using QuickTime, so I’m going to go here. Whoops. Excuse me, down to my Launchpad, and we are going to open the QuickTime player.
(01:25) – Connect the Phone and Launch QuickTime Player
Now, when it first comes open like this, it actually wants to open a file, but we’re not going to do that. We’re not opening a new file. Now, first of all, just to make sure, and I’ll have this in the checklist below, your phone has to be tethered to the computer. So you need that USB lightning cable plugged into the computer for your phone to do this. I am using an iPhone. If there could be some tweaks with Android, I’m not sure, but this is the way it works beautifully with an iPhone on a Mac. So I’ve opened the QuickTime player. Now what I want to do is do a – excuse me, is do a file, new, movie, recording.
(02:25) – You select the Phone under the Camera Option
So now it’s getting ready to record. If you see my little record button here, there’s also a little down arrow next to it. If I click on it, see, you have the option between your FaceTime camera or your iPhone. I have my phone plugged in, and I’m going to go ahead and click Kimberly’s iPhone.
(03:01) – Display the Phone Screen
And now, here it comes! And there’s my iPhone. You can actually see what I was just listening to, it was a podcast, one of my favorites. But now I can come over here and I can go over to Chrome. Now, I am pushing the buttons on the phone. This doesn’t allow you to take control on the computer. I have to manage the phone to do this, but I can now work on my phone and you can see it on the screen. This is great when I’m doing a Zoom with a customer to show them what something looks like on the phone. So actually let’s go look at something on the phone. Whoops. My one challenge on the phone is I am really not a good phone typer. But this would be something I might be working with them through and we would be looking at what does it look like, because it’s going to look different when it’s on a screen than when it’s here on the phone. So then if I want to look at the site, I can scroll. I’m scrolling on the phone. You’re seeing it on the screen. So that’s all there is to sharing your phone. Your iPhone, I should say, on your Mac screen using the QuickTime player. Let me know if you have any questions. I hope this helps, particularly if you’re a developer who needs to share the screen that you’ve developed with your customers. I’m Kim Shivler. I’ll see you next time. Bye!
