We shipped a camera app where you record the shutter sound yourself

Voicame (ボイカメ) is a camera app we published for iPhone. Here's the honest account of what it does, how we built it, and where it falls short.

The idea

The starting point was simple: what if the shutter click was yours to choose?

iOS 17.2 shipped AVCaptureEventInteraction — an API that lets apps hook into the hardware shutter button event. We used it to play back any recorded audio at the exact moment of capture. So instead of the default click, you hear whatever you recorded: a name, a word, a short clip.

Recordings export via AirDrop. We kept coming back to one use case while building this: recording a child's name, then passing that recording to a partner's phone in a couple of taps so both phones make the same sound.

The symmetry side

The app also has six real-time symmetry modes — horizontal, vertical, diagonal, quad, kaleidoscope, and swirl — applied to both photo and video with a live preview. Under the hood: CoreImage's CIKaleidoscope, a Metal rendering pass, and AVAssetWriter for video output. Everything runs on-device; no frames or audio leave the phone.

What we'd change

Symmetry cameras are not a new idea. Kaleidoscope and mirror camera apps already exist in the App Store. The differentiator here is the audio customization, not the symmetry alone.

Shutter volume is tied to the system media volume — there's no separate slider in the app. That's a friction point we haven't resolved yet. The app also requires iOS 17.2+; no Android version exists.