--- title: "How to set up an iPhone baby monitor with Cribbit" description: "Setting up Cribbit takes about a minute: a six-character code, no account, and a spare iPhone as the nursery camera. Here's what to prepare before the first night." date: "2026-10-13" app: cribbit readingTime: "5 min read" image: "/img/build/cribbit/iphone-pairing.jpg" imageAlt: "Cribbit's pairing screen showing a six-character code to enter on the other phone" --- Setting up Cribbit as a baby monitor takes about a minute: open the app on both phones, one shows a six-character code, the other enters it, and the nursery feed starts. No account creation, no email address, nothing to configure on a router. What follows is what to prepare before the first night — which phone to put in the nursery, how to keep the stream running, and what the app is doing while you sleep. ## Which device goes in the nursery Cribbit runs as two roles: the nursery camera and the parent monitor. Either iPhone can play either role. The practical question is which device to use for the nursery. The nursery phone needs to stay awake while it streams. iOS requires the camera to stay in the foreground — if the phone locks, the video stops. The nursery device has to remain active with Cribbit running. That said, Cribbit keeps the nursery screen dark to avoid lighting the room. The app holds its own UI dark while the camera runs, so there's no bright rectangle aimed at the baby. What matters is that the phone itself isn't locked by iOS. What follows from that: the nursery phone needs to be plugged in. Active camera use, screen-on, for a full night, will drain most batteries before morning. A charging cable in the nursery is part of the setup, not an afterthought. If you have a spare iPhone that otherwise sits in a drawer, the nursery is where it earns its keep. Audio continues when the nursery phone's screen locks — iOS lets apps receive audio in the background in a way it doesn't allow for the camera. So if you step away and the nursery phone locks, the sound keeps coming through on the parent side, and cry alerts will still fire. The video will stop, and the connection status will shift to Stalled rather than showing the camera feed. ## Before the first night On the nursery phone, before you start a monitoring session: **Auto-Lock.** The iOS screen-lock timer will stop the video feed if it fires. Set Auto-Lock to Never in Display & Brightness for the duration of monitoring. You can reset it afterward. **Focus.** Incoming notifications on the nursery phone won't stop the stream, but a Focus mode reduces interruptions on a device you aren't actively watching. **Charging.** Plug in both phones. The parent phone benefits too, especially if you plan to leave the screen on while monitoring. ## Pairing Launch Cribbit on both devices. Each one asks which role it's playing. The nursery phone will show a six-character code. Enter it on the parent phone, and the two devices pair. ![iPad onboarding screen headed "No router. No cloud. No account."](/img/build/cribbit/ipad-onboarding.jpg) *iPad onboarding step headed "No router. No cloud. No account."* No credentials are created in that process. The pairing code is the full handshake. On iPhone 12 and later running iOS 26, the two devices connect directly over Wi-Fi Aware — the peer-to-peer radio protocol behind AirDrop — without involving a router. On earlier hardware or iOS versions, Cribbit uses your home Wi-Fi as the transport, but the stream stays on the local network and doesn't reach the internet. After the first pairing, the devices recognise each other for future sessions. The stream is encrypted between the two devices with a per-session key. Cribbit requires iOS or iPadOS 17 or later on both devices. The direct Wi-Fi Aware connection — the one that needs no router — requires iPhone 12 or later running iOS 26. ## Sound tuning After pairing, the app will ask you to let it listen to the room. This step teaches Cribbit what quiet sounds like in this specific nursery. ![Cribbit's "What can you hear?" sound tuning screen](/img/build/cribbit/iphone-listening.jpg) *The sound tuning screen, where the classifier learns the room's own noise level.* Cry detection doesn't fire on a fixed loudness threshold. It learns the room's baseline — a white-noise machine, street traffic, a fan, whatever is normally present — and responds when something breaks that pattern in a sustained way. The classifier runs on the nursery device, using a model that ships with iOS. Nothing is sent to a server. A door closing in a hallway won't trigger an alert. A cry that persists will. ## What the parent phone shows The parent monitor shows the nursery feed and reports one of three connection states: Live, Stalled, or Lost. Live means frames are arriving with current timestamps — every frame the nursery camera sends carries the moment it was captured, and the parent phone checks whether those timestamps are advancing. Stalled means the timestamps stopped advancing: the nursery phone may have locked, the app may have been backgrounded, or the connection has become unreliable. Lost means the devices are no longer connected. This matters because a stalled feed and a live quiet room look identical on screen — the last frame is still there in both cases. Without the status, you can't tell them apart. Knowing which one you're looking at is the difference between sleeping and wondering. The monitor also shows the room's sound level in decibels, but connection state is displayed first. ## What's free and what costs extra Live video, live audio, and cry alerts are free. The encrypted stream is free. One optional, one-time payment unlocks four features: **Background listening** keeps the nursery audio and alerts arriving on the parent phone with the screen off or while other apps are in use. This is the feature that lets you put the phone face-down on the nightstand and still hear the room. **Picture in Picture** keeps a floating nursery window visible while you use other apps on the parent phone. **Talk-back** lets you speak from the parent phone into the room, played through the nursery speaker. **Lullabies** plays audio through the nursery device, started and stopped remotely from the parent side. It is not a subscription. The unlock applies to every device your family uses. ## Where to get it Cribbit requires iOS or iPadOS 17 or later and is in TestFlight beta. Visit [cribbit.xeve.io](https://cribbit.xeve.io) to join and try the free version first.