Which iPhones Support Multi-Cam (Dual Camera) Recording?

Before downloading a dual-camera video app, the most common question is simply: will this even work on my phone? Here's the short version, and why it depends on more than just "how new" your iPhone is.

The short answer: iPhone XS and later

Apple introduced simultaneous multi-camera capture (the API developers call AVCaptureMultiCamSession) starting with the A12 Bionic chip, which first shipped in the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR in 2018. Every iPhone released since — XS through today's lineup — has shipped with an A12 or later chip, so if your iPhone was released in 2018 or after, it almost certainly supports dual-camera recording at the hardware level.

Why older iPhones can't do it

Running two camera streams at once — decoding, processing, and encoding both simultaneously — is a meaningfully heavier workload than a single camera feed. Apple restricted the multi-camera API to chips with enough dedicated image-processing headroom to handle it reliably, which is why the cutoff lines up with the A12 generation rather than being available on every iPhone that can shoot 4K video.

It also depends on iOS version

Multi-camera support was introduced in iOS 13. Most dual-camera apps set a more recent minimum (often iOS 17 or later) to take advantage of newer stabilization, rotation, and encoding APIs — so an older iPhone that meets the hardware bar but is stuck on an old iOS version may still not qualify for the newest apps.

What if your iPhone doesn't support dual-lens mode?

You're not necessarily out of luck. Single-lens dual-format recording — capturing one camera feed and cropping a second aspect ratio out of it live — works on effectively any iPhone that can run the app at all, since it only ever processes one camera stream. See our guide on dual-lens vs single-lens recording for how the two compare.

How to check for certain

The most reliable check is simply installing an app that uses the multi-camera API — it queries AVCaptureMultiCamSession.isMultiCamSupported at launch and will fall back gracefully (or tell you) if your specific device doesn't qualify, rather than relying on a static list that can miss regional model variants.