Dedicate a spare Android phone as the camera and plug it in.

Pair it to your account by scanning its QR code with your everyday phone.

Follow the newest photo, adjust capture settings and build time-lapse videos from anywhere.

Phone operating systems will not let an ordinary app capture in the background for a month — which is why most time-lapse apps are built for short clips. CorvoCam takes the opposite path: a spare phone, dedicated and powered, running one job as the device’s whole purpose. That single decision is what makes week-after-week capture realistic on hardware you already own.

Dedicated time-lapse cameras solve the same problem with expensive hardware, often with a monthly fee on top. A spare phone with the right software is cheaper, better connected, and easier to replace.

The active job is saved as it runs, shot by shot. If a shot hangs, the job carries on by itself. If the phone restarts, CorvoCam is updated, or Android closes the app, capture pauses and the camera phone shows a notification; tap it and the job picks up on its original timing grid — a shot scheduled for 10:00 still happens at 10:00.

Storage is managed the same way: set a limit and CorvoCam recycles the oldest already-synced photos, or stops cleanly and alerts you — your choice. Battery and storage warnings reach your viewer devices as push alerts.

Yes. On Android, capture runs inside a foreground camera service and the phone is woken for every scheduled shot, so the screen can be off while photos keep landing on time — with a persistent notification always showing. It needs one permission: allow CorvoCam to ignore battery optimization when the camera offers it; screen-off capture does not hold without it. On battery, some phones also ask to let CorvoCam wake them on time, so they can sleep between photos. Some manufacturers layer their own battery manager on top of Android’s, and on those phones it can still throttle scheduled captures and miss shots. That is the phone’s power management, outside CorvoCam’s reach. On a phone whose camera stack cannot run the advanced engine, CorvoCam falls back to a compatibility engine and tells you so on the camera screen: capture there is bound to the camera view, so the screen stays on — press Dim to black it out while the job keeps running.

Because for a job that stays awake between photos from start to finish, as one that runs plugged in does, exposure, focus and white balance are locked. On the advanced engine the camera converges first, then locks all three, so lighting changes between shots don’t pump the exposure — the classic time-lapse flicker. Once a job has slept between photos to save battery, each photo sets its own exposure instead until that job ends, even if the phone is plugged in later, and the finished video smooths the brightness from one photo to the next, so a steadily lit scene looks the same either way. On the compatibility engine CorvoCam applies what the hardware allows.

One QR scan. The camera phone shows a code, your signed-in everyday phone scans and claims it, and the camera is bound to your account. From then on, any of your devices — Android, iPhone or browser — sees its health, changes capture settings while a job runs, and starts or stops jobs remotely.

Capture keeps running. CorvoCam is offline-first: every photo is stored on the camera phone first, and nothing in the capture path ever waits on the network. Cloud sync drains a durable queue in the background when a connection returns — an outage costs you nothing but remote viewing while it lasts.

Only you. Every photo is captured to the camera phone first; anything you sync is stored private to your account and reaches your own devices over short-lived signed links. No ads, no data sales — the privacy policy has the full table.

Time-lapses compile into MP4 video on the camera phone itself — where the photos already live — and compiling can be triggered remotely from any viewer. Videos stay on the camera phone, ready to export or share.