Recording a vertical phone tutorial
A mobile app tutorial recorded vertically (as covered more generally in our aspect ratio guide) has a specific space problem: the phone screen itself already fills most of a vertical frame, leaving little room for anything else — narration text, your face, context — without things feeling cramped.
The phone screen doesn’t need to fill the entire frame
The instinct is to zoom the phone screen to fill as much vertical space as possible, but a small margin around it — even just enough to add a title or a brief on-screen note — reads as more intentional than edge-to-edge phone screen with nothing else in frame.
Where a facecam actually fits in a vertical mobile tutorial
If you’re including yourself on camera (covered more generally in our picture-in-picture guide), a small bubble in a top or bottom corner works better for phone-screen content than it does for desktop tutorials, since the phone screen itself is already narrow and vertical — competing for the same visual space a desktop tutorial’s wider frame wouldn’t have to worry about.
Text overlays need to be genuinely large
Vertical mobile tutorials are disproportionately watched on other phones, at a small physical size — text overlays that would be perfectly readable on a desktop-viewed video can become illegible at mobile-to-mobile viewing scale. Err toward larger text than feels necessary when you’re reviewing the recording on a bigger screen while editing.
Recording natively vertical beats cropping from landscape every time
As covered in the aspect ratio guide more broadly, this matters even more specifically for phone tutorials — a landscape recording of a phone screen, cropped to vertical afterward, usually cuts off part of the actual screen content, since phone screens are already vertical and don’t crop cleanly from a landscape capture.
Frequently asked questions
Should a phone screen fill the entire vertical frame?
Not necessarily — a small margin around it, even just enough for a title or brief text, tends to read as more intentional than edge-to-edge framing with nothing else visible.
Where should a facecam go in a vertical mobile tutorial?
A small bubble in a top or bottom corner works well, since it competes less with the already-narrow phone screen content than it would in a wider desktop tutorial frame.
Related reading: Aspect ratio mistakes that ruin a recording · Setting up picture-in-picture webcam · Best screen recorder for iPhone