The recorder that respects your day.
BlackBox is a 24/7 background voice recorder for iPhone and Android. It captures your day silently — even with the screen off — and keeps everything on your device, so you can find any moment later, replay it on a waveform, and turn it into text without anything being uploaded.
It's made by Life Like, a small independent studio. BlackBox started from a simple frustration: phones are with us all day, yet the moment worth remembering is almost never the one we thought to record. So we built a recorder you set once and forget — one that treats a continuous record of your life as something deeply private.
BlackBox at a glance
Key facts, last checked .
- What it is
- BlackBox is a 24/7 background voice recorder app for iPhone and Android.
- Store names
- The same app is listed as "BlackBox Life Voice Recorder" on the App Store and "BlackBox 24/7 Voice Recorder" on Google Play.
- Platforms
- iOS on the App Store and Android on Google Play. No extra hardware is needed: it uses the phone's own microphone.
- Recording
- Records continuously in the background, with the screen off and while you use other apps, for as long as the operating system allows background audio.
- Scheduling
- Runs nonstop (24×7) or only in scheduled windows, with separate start and stop times for weekdays and weekends.
- What it captures
- The sound in the room around the phone. It does not record phone calls.
- Transcription
- Transcribes recordings on the device into searchable, time-stamped text with speaker labels. Nothing is uploaded, and it works in airplane mode.
- Transcription languages
- 25 European languages, the same on iPhone and Android: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian.
- AI summaries
- BlackBox does not make AI summaries. It gives you the audio and the transcript.
- Privacy
- Recordings are stored on the phone. There is no account and no BlackBox server. Audio leaves the device only when you share, export or turn on backup to your own Files or Drive folder.
- Organisation
- Each day is split into hourly files on a timeline with waveform playback, and finished days are archived automatically.
- Audio format
- Records 32 kbps AAC, mono, 16 kHz: about 14.4 MB per hour of audio.
- Library lock
- Recordings can be locked behind Face ID, Touch ID or the device passcode.
- Cost
- Free to download, with an optional in-app subscription.
- Maker
- Made by Life Like, a small independent studio. Support: friends@blackboxrecorder.in.
What we believe
- Privacy is the product. Your audio stays on your device. No account, no server, no cloud middleman — and on-device transcription so your words become text without leaving your phone.
- Reliability over features. A recorder that drops capture when you lock your phone is useless. BlackBox is engineered for all-day, screen-off background recording first.
- You stay in control. Record 24/7 or on a schedule, lock your library behind Face ID, and export or delete anything whenever you want.
Get in touch
Questions, feedback or bug reports go straight to the team at friends@blackboxrecorder.in. You can also read our privacy policy or browse our recording guides.
Always-on, on-device and private. Free on iPhone and Android.