Maya: a native macOS app that wraps iPhone screen recordings in device frames
🖥️ 📱 ▶️ Wrap your iPhone screen recordings in a beautiful device frame, add cinematic zoom moments, and export ready-to-share videos.
At a glance
- What is it?
- Maya is an MIT licensed SwiftUI app for macOS 26.3 and later that drops a screen recording into an iPhone, iPad or MacBook frame, adds zoom, speed and tap feedback on a timeline, and exports an H.264 mp4 for social feeds or a HEVC with alpha mov for transparent overlays.
- Who is it for?
- Take Maya if you record iPhone screens on a Mac running macOS 26.3 or later and publish the results, because framing, zoom moments, tap feedback and speed segments cover the whole polish pass in one native window, and the HEVC with alpha export is the feature that separates it from screenshot tools that stop at a framed image.
- Can I use it commercially?
- Yes. MIT is a permissive licence: you can use, modify and sell software built on it, as long as you keep its copyright and licence notices.
- Is it still maintained?
- Yes. The repository last received commits 27 days ago.
- What is it written in?
- Mainly Swift, according to GitHub's language statistics.
Answers come from the project's GitHub data, last synced on September 17, 2026, and from our analysis. They are not legal advice.
DEEP OPEN-SOURCE ANALYSIS
What Maya is for
A raw iPhone screen recording is a rectangle of pixels with a status bar and rounded corners nobody asked for. Maya turns that recording into a presentable clip: it wraps the video in a device mockup with the correct screen cutout and corner radius, lets you adjust pacing, add zoom moments and visible tap feedback, and export something ready to drop into a social feed or an app tutorial. The README positions the output as marketing clips, social-media posts and in-app tutorial overlays, and the tech is native end to end: SwiftUI plus AppKit with a custom NSViewRepresentable for AVPlayerLayer, AVFoundation composition, Core Image and Metal for per-frame compositing, and VideoToolbox for the HEVC encoder properties. The app is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so the downloaded dmg opens with a normal double click and there is no quarantine workaround to perform.
Device framing and the canvas
The framing set covers iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro, the 11 inch iPad Pro turned sideways, and MacBook Pro 14, and the iPhones include their titanium color variants such as Cosmic Orange, Deep Blue and Natural Titanium. Model and color switch from the sidebar in one click. Two modes go beyond the physical devices: Generic mode draws a brand-agnostic frame with user-defined bezel width and bezel color, and No frame mode ships the bare recording with rounded corners only, with a corner radius slider in both modes that runs from sharp to stadium. The framed device sits inside a configurable canvas with 1:1, 9:16, 4:5, a sideways 4:3 and 16:9 widescreen aspect options, so one source recording targets Reels, Shorts, TikTok, YouTube, X or an in-app overlay. Scale and reposition work through a slider plus drag, and an optional drop shadow has controls for color, blur, X and Y offset and opacity.
The timeline: trim, speed, zoom and taps
The bottom timeline is where the editing happens, and the README describes it as like shots.so for Mac. A thumbnail strip shows the video, trimming uses draggable in and out handles or the I and O keys to mark the range from the playhead. The speed track marks any part of the recording and plays it from 0.25x to 4x with presets, draggable segment edges, a dedicated editor and rate-aware live playback, and version 1.2 is the release that added these partial recording speed controls. Zoom events are dropped by hovering anywhere on the zoom track, and each carries a start, duration, scale, focus of Top, Center or Bottom, independent zoom-in and zoom-out timing, and one of six animation curves from Spring, the soft overshoot default, through Bouncy, Smooth, Snappy and Gentle to Linear. Tap events land at the playhead, get positioned by clicking the device screen, and render as Ripple, Pulse or Ring with their own timing, color and size on a separate draggable track. Five one-click presets combine scale, focus, duration and curve: Quick Punch, Dramatic, Top Focus, Bottom Focus and Soft Reveal. Dragging previews continuously and settles to 0.25 second intervals or the nearby playhead, and every edit lands in an inline right-side panel rather than a modal.
Backgrounds and the two export paths
The background picker has five modes. None shows a Photoshop-style checkered preview and is the setting that enables the interesting export: a .mov with HEVC plus an alpha channel, produced through a manual AVAssetReader and AVAssetWriter pipeline, which composites the framed device over any UI inside another AVPlayer or AVKit consumer and is the format to use for in-app tutorials or a Final Cut and Motion edit. Solid uses a brand-aligned palette plus custom hex, Gradient offers eight presets derived from the app color 6466FA, Image scales any picture to fill, and Video Blur generates a Keynote-style blurred poster of the recording itself as the backdrop. The other export path is a 1080 by 1080 or aspect-matched .mp4 in H.264 for direct posting. Speed changes, zooms and tap animations bake into both formats, and synchronized audio and video export applies to speed segments.
Installing it and building from source
The release page offers Maya.dmg, and the README links a direct latest-release download. The system bar is the first thing to check, because Maya requires macOS 26.3 (Tahoe) or later, and building it yourself needs Xcode 26.5 or later plus a recording in .mp4 or .mov format as input. The source build is the standard Xcode sequence.
git clone https://github.com/ronaldo-avalos/Maya.git
cd Maya
open Maya.xcodeprojthen run from Xcode. Two implementation details explain behavior you might otherwise misread. Export runs on a dedicated Swift Concurrency actor so the interface never blocks during a long render. And the app runs sandboxed with a file hard-link and copy adoption strategy: recordings are brought into the sandbox container on load so AVFoundation can read them from any thread, which is why adding a file takes a moment on large inputs. Keyboard control is complete enough to edit without the mouse: Space plays and pauses, M mutes, the arrow keys scrub by 0.25 seconds or 1 second with shift, I and O mark trim, and Option delete resets trim while delete and Command D remove or duplicate the selected event.
Release history and what the fixes say
Version 1.0 arrived on 2026-05-22 as the first public release. Version 1.1, published on 2026-08-02, is the release that added visible tap feedback with the Ripple, Pulse and Ring styles, direct tap placement on the device screen with a dedicated timeline track and editor panel, continuous live zoom preview while dragging with snapping on release, and a fix for a settings sidebar that stopped being accessible in compact windows. Version 1.2, published on 2026-08-23, added the partial recording speed controls. The fix list also names a zoom segment drag stutter and a preset customization crash, both resolved in 1.1, which is the normal profile of a young app finding its editing interactions: the features are ahead of the rough edges, and the rough edges so far have been interaction polish rather than data loss.
Where it stops
The macOS 26.3 requirement is the widest gate, and it is stated in both the README and the v1.0 release notes with no compatibility mode offered, so a Mac that cannot run Tahoe cannot run Maya at all. The input contract is a single .mp4 or .mov screen recording: there is no multi-clip timeline, no concatenation of several takes, and no audio track editing beyond mute, so anything beyond one recording in, one clip out belongs in a video editor. The speed controls are described as partial in the v1.2 release that introduced them, which is worth remembering if your pacing plan depends on them. The device catalog is fixed at the five shipped models plus Generic and No frame, so a newly announced iPhone needs a Maya update before its frame exists. None of these are hidden, but together they define a focused tool rather than a general editor, and the project does not pretend otherwise.
Compared with shots.so and the manual route
The README itself names the comparison, describing the timeline as like shots.so for Mac, the commercial app in the same framing-and-zoom niche. Maya's differentiators are the price, free and MIT licensed with the source available, the transparency export, and a device catalog that currently reaches the iPhone 17 Pro generation. The manual route is FFmpeg or Keynote: wrapping a recording in a frame image and cutting a zoom is possible, but animated zoom with chosen curves, tap ripples and speed segments by hand is hours of keyframing per clip, which is exactly the work Maya automates. Screen Studio occupies the paid native spot for macOS screen capture with automatic zoom, so the practical choice is whether you want open source with manual control of every zoom and tap, which is Maya, or automatic zoom generation, which is the paid tools. For app marketing teams already recording on iPhone, Maya covers the polish pass without a subscription.
Licence and upkeep
The project is MIT licensed with a LICENSE file at the root, reports 1034 stars, and its last push was on 2026-08-23, the same day as the v1.2 release. The repository carries RELEASING.md for maintainers, a docs directory, a scripts directory, presets-videos and a Maya.xcodeproj, and the README states the project is in active development with contributions welcome from macOS and iOS developers and designers alike. A project website lives at ronaldo-avalos.github.io/Maya. The three releases between May and August 2026 form a steady cadence, and the contribution history shows outside pull requests already merged, including most of the 1.1 feature set, which is a healthier sign for longevity than a single-author project of the same age.
Editorial conclusion
Take Maya if you record iPhone screens on a Mac running macOS 26.3 or later and publish the results, because framing, zoom moments, tap feedback and speed segments cover the whole polish pass in one native window, and the HEVC with alpha export is the feature that separates it from screenshot tools that stop at a framed image. Skip it if you are on an older macOS, since the Tahoe requirement is hard, or if you need multi-clip editing, because the workflow is one recording in and one clip out. Version 1.2 shipped partial speed controls on 2026-08-23, which tells you where the development edge is, and the app being signed and notarized means the install is a drag, not a workaround.
Frequently asked questions
Does Maya run on macOS Sequoia or older versions?
No. Both the README and the v1.0 release notes state Maya requires macOS 26.3 (Tahoe) or later, and no compatibility mode is offered, so older macOS versions cannot run the app.
How do I export a video with a transparent background from Maya?
Set the background to the None mode and export, which produces a .mov with HEVC plus an alpha channel instead of the standard H.264 .mp4, so the framed device can be composited over other UI in players or editors.
Is Maya safe to install without bypassing Gatekeeper?
Yes. The README states the app is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so the downloaded dmg opens with a normal double click and no security workaround is needed.
Community notes