Best Screen Recorder for Android
The best screen recorders for Android right now, including the best free and paid options and the different features between them to help you decide which is the best one for you. Plus a tutorial on each shows you exactly how to record your Android screen in just a few taps.
All the links to everything mentioned in this post, you can find linked in the description box below.
I have two options for you. Let’s start with the simplest and free one first. After that, will introduce you to a more advanced solution, which is also free, but has a paid option to unlock additional features and remove certain limitations.
How to use the built-in screen recorder on Android
Best Screen Recorder for Android: The first option is to use the built-in screen recorder on Android. This is something that they started releasing in version 11, and it’s actually pretty good.
Now, if you haven’t done the update to Android 11, or it’s not supported on your device yet, you might find that you’ve already got
a decent screen recorder built in.
A lot of Samsung phones and others have had built-in screen recorders for quite a while and they’re pretty good too.
So to find it, you just wanna swipe down from the top past the notifications until you’re able to see the menu options there and then you might need to swipe across to find the screen recorder.
Now, if it’s not showing for you, you can press the edit button down the bottom left-hand corner and you can customize up which icons are actually shown on there.
And also the order that they’re shown. So I’m gonna go back out of this now, and I’m just gonna press on Screen Record Start, and it’s gonna pop up with some options.
Now this is actually pretty powerful and it’s awesome that they’ve included them in here because this is normally what you need. One of the other apps, like the one I’m gonna show you next unlocks more functionality. So you’ve got the option here, not just to record your device’s screen, but also to record audio.
And if we press on this little drop-down arrow here, we get to choose what audio we’d like to capture.
So we can just record the audio from the phone’s microphone.
So if I’m gonna be speaking, then it would just record that.
We can also record just the device’s audio.
So if I’m gonna be watching a video or playing a game, and I want that audio captured, then I can select Device audio, or you can actually select both, Device audio and microphone as well, which is so awesome that they’ve included that in here.
Now, if you don’t want audio at all, then you can just disable that option, but the last one here has Show touches on the screen, this is where if you enable this, you will actually see the little touch marks appear on the screen as you’re running through your recording so that your viewers or anyone watching can follow along with what it is you’re doing.
So then all you need to do to start your recording is press Start and then when you’re ready to stop your recording, you can just scan swipe down from the top to bring up your notifications and just press, Tap to stop. That will then go ahead and save the file on your device.
which then you can open up in your photos app and you can trim it down or share it out from there. So that’s a really simple straightforward way that you can record your Android device screen.
How to use XRecorder on Android
Now, if you don’t have access to a built-in screen recorder on your Android device already, then that’s where you’re gonna have to install an app to do it.
Now, there is an absolute ton of them out there, but my favourite and the one that I recommend is called XRecorder. And it’s actually by the same company that makes InShot the video editing app.
So then you download and open up the app, you’re probably just gonna see, this little floating orange widget here that you can pick up and that you can move around.
This is kind of your quick access to all the controls and all the functionality inside of XRecorder. So if we press on that now and just press the home button to take us to the actual home app, I’ll run you through some of the features in here and then show you the rest of that quick access button. Let’s go down to Settings just down the bottom right-hand corner. So you can see here how many more settings and how much more control we get over our screen recording
XRecorder settings
Then what we had with the built-in Android one. So straight away, we get to adjust the resolution, lots of different options in there from 240P right up to 10 ADP. Quality, we get to record it up to 16 megabits per second. So the higher the number, the better the quality, but also the larger the file size will be as well. So I can leave this on the maximum here 16, you also get to choose your frames per second.
So if you’re doing any sort of gaming videos or anything like that, then you would want to be recording at 50 or 60, the higher frame rates, so that you’re gonna get a smoother video for your game screen recording, but you also have options right down to 15 frames per second in here too. You also have the ability to leave your screen orientation on Auto, or you can actually lock it so that the video is gonna stay at landscape or portrait.
Now, if we come down here, you can see that you have the option to record audio here as well. So I’ll just tick this box and then we get to choose our audio source. So it’s currently set to recording Internal Audio, or we can set it to do our microphone as well. So the microphone in the phone. Now, what this doesn’t have surprisingly, is the ability like we have with the built-in app to record both the microphone and internal audio.
And there is a little bit of a warning there saying that internal audio recording is only supported on Android 10 and above, and there’s even an app support list. If you press this Check Supported App List is gonna go through a look at all the apps that are installed on your phone, and it’s going to give you a checkbox as to whether they are supported or not.
You also need to specify where your video file is going to be saved on your device. And if we come down here some more there’s things like a countdown timer in here as well. So it’s currently set to three seconds. We can make it five, or 10, or we can turn it off completely.
We have the option here to hide the recording window while you’re recording. This is one that you can see I’ve got on. So I don’t want the older recording stuff showing while I’m doing the recording. So I like to have that one ticked. You can also here Shake the Phone To Stop Recording. So you don’t even need to press the Stop button, you can just shake your phone, to just stop recording with that one.
You can also turn on our camera for our screen recording as well. So there’s, hey. We can also paint or draw on our screens if we enable the Brush here and we press on the brush, then we can free draw on the screen, we can circle stuff, or there’s even sort of preset shapes and things down the bottom here. So we could draw out a square, we can get arrows.
Probably better than the one that I drew. All of this stuff we can add in, which is again gonna be recorded while we are recording as well. So I can press the little red X down the bottom here to cancel out that. So I’m not gonna run through every feature here, but those are the main ones. Then you can see how much more advanced this is than the built-in one and how much more functionality it has.
XRecorder menu
So I’m gonna go back to my Android desktop here now, and you can see that we’ve got the app still running here. And so if I press on this, this is that little quick launch menu again, you can see we’ve got direct access now to press record, we can also then bring up our tools, which is then gonna bring up some of those menu items we had before, too quick access to screenshots to enable our camera, to do the brush, enable the microphone.
So we don’t have to dive back into those settings. The next one is the home button to takes us to that main page in the app where we can see all our recordings and the last one, is the settings button, which takes us directly to the settings.
How to start a screen recording with XRecorder
So now, if we want to actually start a screen recording, we can press on the little button here and we can press Record, that’ll count us down, and we are now screen recording with this app. So we can go and do whatever we need to do, when we wanna stop, we again, swipe down from the top.
Let me get this extra menu to appear down in our notifications area. Where we again have access to those tools, we can pause our recording or we can stop it altogether. So I’m gonna press Stop and it says here that our video is saved. We can play it, we can delete it, we can edit it, or we can share it directly from here.
How to edit a screen recording on XRecorder
And that’s the other cool thing about this app is that once we’ve done our screen recording, we can actually edit them down in this app as well. So if we go down to this little edit button, the little pencil down the bottom, we’ve got a heap of extra tools in here for editing videos, compressing videos, merging videos together, editing photos, and those sorts of things here as well. So if we just go Edit Video in here, we can select our video.
Let’s pick this one here and go next. And then we’ve got a heap of editing tools and functionality in here. Now this video editor in this app is here.
XRecorder pricing
does actually put a little watermark on your video, but you can remove it for free. So you can see it’s got the watermark down the bottom there XRecorder. If you actually press on that, they give you the option to watch an ad and that watermark will be removed.
So it’s not on your actual screen recording, it’s actually when you come in to edit in here. Or you can remove it permanently if you upgrade to the paid version. So the paid version or XRecorder Pro it’s a one-time purchase, it’s not a monthly fee or anything like that.
This is gonna remove all of the ads and there are quite a lot of them on there. It’s also going to remove the watermark permanently and give you access to more of those tools in there, like the video compressor, and also the ability to add text to your images.
So the price you’re seeing on my screen is in Australian dollars, $9 49. I’m pretty sure it works out as around six or $7 US to upgrade to the pro version. So it’s still ridiculously cheap considering what you’re getting access to. So those are my top recommendations for recording your Android device screen.
