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Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

I also have a legitimate reason to snap still photos on a smartphone, without making the shutter sound. On an iPhone, it sounds just like an SLR film camera, and is very loud.

However, it turns out that it is unlawful to do that in such countries as Japan.

Asking how to silence the iphone camera on stackoverflow resulted in 20,000 views of my post, several people saying you can't do that, and several people telling me it's against the law, that it would be a bad idea and so on.

Nevertheless, I have a completely legitimate reason to do so.

I expect Apple would reject it from the App Store. I may do it for Android, as well as for jailbroken iOS devices, but then sell it through the Cydia App Store.

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I read someone was able to "remove" the click sound by playing the same click sound phase shifted when taking a photo - so when the OS sound mixer adds the two waveforms together it results in silence. Clever idea - it is the same as noise canceling headphones, except it all happens in software.

As others have mentioned, if you put your iphone in silent mode there is no click sound except in Japan. I'm not sure if a) phones sold in Japan have disabled this feature or b) the phone knows when it is located in Japan and then disables silent mode.

I doubt that would work well in practice. The reason is that timing is extremely important for this to work, if you're even one sample off you'll here a faint sound, and more than a few then it's quite obvious. So if the sound is generated by a separate OS process, you'll never know exactly when the sound is generated and you will not even have control over exactly when your own sound is played back in relation to the other process, think sub ms accuracy.

You can disable the shutter sound in Android by just putting the phone in silent mode.

Hey Thanks!

It's just like Apple to be a corporate nanny.

I've done some Android Platform Development, but not yet any real Android App Development. I'll do that after I ship the iOS App I'm working on.

My iPhone doesn't make a peep in silent mode using either the builtin camera app or Camera+.

I haven't actually tried this for quite a long time. Perhaps Apple added a silent mode so as to compete with Android.

There's a lot of stuff that at one time would only work on jailbroken devices, only for Apple to "add support" for it as a result of some App becoming a huge hit at the Cydia App store.

At first one could not even take still photos programmatically, the user had to use Apple's own App for that. But Snapture - if I remember correctly - was able to do it on jailbroken devices, so Apple added the public API so that Snapture would be sold on the App Store, rather than through Cydia.

  > Perhaps Apple added a silent mode so as to compete with
  > Android.

Every single iPhone I had (and I had 3G, 4, 4S, 5, 5S) was able to take photo without sound if it was switched to silent. Probably differs by the region, i.e. those shipped to Japan make camera sound no matter what, others don't.

Is there a way to silence the shutter sound from code?

It doesn't have to be Objective-C and Cocoa Touch. I'd be completely cool with C and system calls.

I have an Android phone that's not rooted, an Acer. Turning off shutter sound is in the camera settings, it's one of the first things I do with a camera as I prefer natural photos of family to posed ones.

Lol silent mode?

Not in Japan.

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