Why On-Device Matters for Screen Recording
Screen recordings capture pre-release products, client work and credentials. Here is why where your recording is processed matters as much as how it looks.
Think about what ends up in a screen recording: a product that has not launched, a client's dashboard, an internal admin tool, an email in a sidebar, sometimes a password typed on camera. A screen recording is one of the most sensitive files you create, and it is easy to forget that.
Where does the recording go?
Many modern recorders are built around the cloud. Some upload by default so they can give you a share link. Others upload when you use AI features such as transcripts, captions or automatic cutting, because the model runs on their servers. Read the footnotes of any AI video tool and you will often find a line about online processing.
That is a reasonable trade for some people. For anyone recording work under NDA, a pre-release build, or anything in a regulated industry, it can be a deal-breaker.
What on-device means in Glidesmith
- Capture uses Apple's ScreenCaptureKit on your Mac.
- Editing and compositing run on your Mac's GPU through Metal.
- Export uses your Mac's hardware encoder through VideoToolbox.
- There is no account, so there is nothing to sign in to and no profile to build.
- The network is used for two things only: activating and checking a licence key with Polar, and fetching in-app announcements from glidesmith.com.
You do not have to take our word for it. Run a network monitor such as Little Snitch while you record and export. You will see those connections and nothing else, and none of them carries your recording.
What about AI?
On-device used to mean giving up AI features. It no longer does. Apple Silicon is fast enough to run speech recognition models such as whisper.cpp locally. That is how Glidesmith's upcoming AI cutting will work: transcription, filler-word detection and word-based editing, all on your Mac. It is on the roadmap, clearly marked as not shipped yet.
Keystrokes are the other half
Auto-zoom needs to know where you click, which means observing input. A careless recorder could log every key you press. Glidesmith records keyboard shortcuts like ⌘S and keys that type nothing, such as Return, for callouts, and never a letter on its own, so the event log cannot reconstruct typed text. A test in the app's codebase checks this and is never skipped.
The short version
How a recording looks matters. Where it goes matters more. Glidesmith keeps both on your Mac.
Written by Glidesmith Team
Building Glidesmith, the Mac screen recorder for demos and tutorials. Local, no account.
Try Glidesmith free
Record, auto-zoom and polish your next demo. Free to record and edit, and it never leaves your Mac.
