About

Who publishes this, and how it's sourced

Published 1 August 2026 · Last updated 16 October 2026

Why this site exists

Search for help with a phone borescope and you get three kinds of result: a hardware manufacturer's support page that only covers its own products, a content farm that has never held the device it's describing, or a forum thread from 2021 with no accepted answer.

What's missing is anyone approaching it from the software side. Whether a scope works with your phone is mostly a question about USB host mode, video class compliance, cable wiring and operating-system permissions — and those are answerable precisely, with sources, rather than guessed at.

That's the gap these guides are written to fill. They're written by Andre Gaz, who builds InspectCam™ — so the platform detail comes from working with these APIs directly rather than from reading someone else's summary of them.

How the guides are researched

Every technical claim here traces to one of three places, and the pages say which:

• Primary documentation. Where the behaviour is defined by a platform, we cite the platform. Apple's statement that external UVC cameras are supported only on iPads with USB-C is quoted and linked. Android's own documented behaviour for torch mode is cited on the page that depends on it.
• Observable, reproducible behaviour. Things you can verify on your own phone in under a minute — that a USB mouse proves host mode, that covering a lens proves a feed is live, that connecting a cable to a computer proves it carries data.
• What people actually report. Where a problem is widespread but undocumented, we say so plainly rather than dressing a pattern up as a specification.

Every page carries a visible published date and a last-updated date, and both appear in the page's structured data. When something changes, the date moves.

What this site won't do

These are constraints we've written down and hold ourselves to, because the temptations in this category are obvious.

No compatibility row without a real test

The compatibility list only contains hardware that has been physically connected to a phone, run, and observed — with a date recorded. Never generated from a spec sheet, a manufacturer's claim, or inference from a similar model in the same range.

Right now it lists one scope that works with InspectCam™, the Klein Tools ET16, and three we tested that don't. A short table with an honest explanation is worth more than a full one built from guesses, and pages of auto-generated model listings are exactly what search engines classify as spam.

No recommending hardware we haven't used

The specs guide explains what the numbers mean and recommends no products. Not because there's nothing worth buying, but because a recommendation from someone who hasn't handled the thing is worthless, and it would undermine the compatibility list on the same site.

No claims about the app that aren't true yet

Features that are planned are labelled as planned, and a feature only appears here in the present tense once it has been run on a real phone and the result written down.

Device claims name the phone and the date

Anything this site says a phone does or doesn't do was run on hardware here: a Pixel 6a (Android 16), a Pixel 4a 5G (Android 13) and a Galaxy S21 (Android 15). The results, including the ones that disagree with each other, are on the phone tests page with the date each was checked. Three phones is a small sample, and the page says so.

About the app

InspectCam™ holds the phone's LED on while showing a live camera view, for looking into places too dark and too tight to get your head into — behind appliances, wall cavities, under sinks, crawlspaces. On most phones the flashlight switches off the moment a camera app opens, which is a platform behaviour rather than a fault, and working around it is the app's reason to exist.

It is free on Google Play, for Android. The iPhone app is coming soon.