How to screen record on Android

Every Android phone from the last few years has a screen recorder built in, so there is no app to install. You add a Screen Recorder tile to Quick Settings, choose whether to capture sound and show your taps, and tap once to start. This guide covers the stock steps, where the video ends up, how Pixel and Samsung phones differ, why the internal-audio option has limits, and why some apps record as a black screen.

Add the tile and start recording#

The recorder lives in Quick Settings, the panel of toggles you pull down from the top of the screen. Menu wording shifts a little between phone brands, but the shape is the same everywhere.

1. Swipe down from the top of the screen twice to open the full Quick Settings panel.
2. Look for a tile named Screen record or Screen recorder. You may have to swipe right through more tiles to find it.
3. If it is not there, tap the pencil or Edit button, then drag the Screen record tile up into the active row.
4. Tap the tile. Before it starts, you can choose whether to record audio and whether to show touches so a dot appears wherever you tap. Pick what to record, then tap Start — a short countdown runs, then recording begins.
5. To stop, swipe down from the top and tap the Screen recorder notification. On Samsung, tap the Stop icon in the floating toolbar instead.

On newer Pixel and stock Android builds you can also choose to record a single app rather than the whole screen, which keeps notifications and other apps out of the clip.

Where your recordings are saved#

The finished video is an ordinary file on your phone, so you can watch it, trim it, or share it like any other clip.

On a Pixel or stock Android phone, open the Photos app, tap Collections, then On this device, then Movies. On a Samsung phone the clip lands in the Gallery app, and Samsung notes that some recordings only show up in the My Files app under Internal storage and then the DCIM folder.

Screen recordings are large — a few minutes of high-quality video runs to hundreds of megabytes. If your phone is tight on space, it helps to free up storage on your Android phone before a long capture, and heavy media sitting around is one reason to speed up a slow Android phone. When the clip is worth keeping, move the file to a computer rather than leaving it on the phone.

Pixel vs. Samsung: the same tool, different labels#

Both use the same underlying feature, but the buttons are named and arranged differently. Samsung’s One UI exposes more settings up front, including a video-quality picker; Pixel keeps the panel short. On Samsung you touch and hold the Screen recorder tile to reach its full settings page.

Option	Pixel / stock Android	Samsung (One UI)
Tile name	Screen record	Screen recorder
Audio choice	Record device audio and Record microphone toggles	None, Media, or Media and mic
Show taps	Show touches	Show taps and touches
Video quality	Set automatically	High (1080p), Medium (720p), Low (480p)
Stop control	Tap the Screen recorder notification	Tap the Stop icon
Saved to	Photos, in the Movies folder	Gallery, sometimes My Files > DCIM

The routes above use each brand’s own wording. If your phone runs a different skin, look for the same ideas — a Screen record tile, an audio choice, and a show-taps switch — rather than the exact labels.

Internal audio comes with limits#

There are two kinds of sound the recorder can capture, and they are not the same thing. The microphone picks up the room around you, including your own voice. Device audio — Samsung calls it Media — is the sound the phone itself is playing, such as a game or a video. To narrate over app sound, choose Media and mic on Samsung, or turn on both the device-audio and microphone toggles on a Pixel.

Two limits are worth knowing before you rely on it. First, protected content mutes its own audio during a recording, so a movie or a music track under copyright protection will not be captured even with device audio switched on. Second, some older phones and skins only offer the microphone, with no device-audio option at all — on those, app sound records only if you play it out loud through the speaker so the mic can hear it.

Why some apps record as a black screen#

Sometimes the recording runs fine but one app comes out as a plain black rectangle where its content should be. That is deliberate. Banking apps, and streaming services like Netflix and Disney+, mark their windows as secure or wrap their video in DRM, which tells Android to leave that content out of screenshots and screen recordings. The recorder does not error out; it simply captures black in that window and drops the protected audio.

Nothing you toggle in the recorder changes this — it is an anti-fraud and anti-piracy measure baked into those apps, not a bug on your phone. If you only need to show a menu or a settings screen inside such an app, that non-protected part usually still records normally; it is the sensitive or copyrighted content that is blanked.

Before you record something you plan to share, do a ten-second test first: check that the audio source is the one you wanted, confirm the app you care about is not blacked out, and remember the file will be large. Fixing those three things up front saves re-recording a five-minute walkthrough that came out silent or blank.