Learn the app
What every button and setting in Roam does. This one’s text for now; screenshots are coming.
The home screen
The home screen is your live preview with a HUD on top: status pills along the top-left, action buttons along the top-right, and the GO LIVE button at the bottom.
Status pills (top-left)
Small readouts, each with a coloured dot:
- LIVE / OFFLINE: your stream state. When live it turns red and shows your bitrate and how long you’ve been streaming.
- Battery: charge percentage.
- Thermal: how hot the phone is (OK, then warmer states). See thermal management.
- NET (while live): live network health. Green is keeping up, amber is straining, red has been struggling. It reads the actual sending queue, so it tells you it’s the network, not the app.
- OBS (when paired): OBS connection. Green connected, and the pill turns red and says OBS LIVE when OBS is broadcasting. Tap it for the scene picker and start/stop OBS streaming.
- Mic level (if enabled): a small meter showing your mic is picking up sound. Tap it to open the mic device picker and gain slider.
Action buttons (top-right)
- Flip camera: switch between front and rear.
- BRB (the cup): full-screen “be right back” with audio muted, or, if OBS is paired with a BRB scene set, switches OBS to that scene. Tap again to return.
- Torch: the rear flashlight, for low light.
- Mic: mute and unmute your microphone.
- Camera: hide the camera (goes black) without stopping the stream.
- Dual cam (if enabled): show the front camera in a corner over the rear. This is a heat-heavy feature, see Camera.
- Stealth: black the screen while the stream keeps running. Long-press anywhere to exit. Good for discretion in public.
- Settings (the gear): everything below.
Going live
Press and hold GO LIVE. The hold prevents accidental taps. The status pill confirms you’re live.
Settings: Stream
- Stream URL: where your video goes (an RTMP or SRT URL). This is the one required setting. Stored encrypted. Tap the “?” for the format, or see the platform guide.
- Saved destinations: save up to three URLs (home OBS, direct Twitch, a service) and switch between them in a couple of taps, handy if a relay dies mid-outing.
- Stream title: quick links to your Twitch and Kick dashboards to set title and category (those live on the platform side).
Settings: Quality
- Resolution and frame rate: set before going live (they can’t change mid-stream).
- Bitrate: with Auto bitrate on, this is a ceiling; with it off, a fixed target.
- Auto bitrate (default on): lowers the bitrate when your connection weakens so the stream keeps flowing, then climbs back as it recovers. It can drop as low as 300 kbps so audio survives. Turn it off if you want a fixed bitrate that never changes.
Settings: Audio
- Microphone: pick your input. Wired and USB mics sound best; Bluetooth uses a phone-call codec (mono, 8–16 kHz) and sounds worse, treat it as a backup. You can switch mid-stream from the mic pill on the HUD.
- Input gain: 0–200% (100% is unity). Above 100% amplifies the mic, and its hiss.
- Show audio levels HUD icon: adds the mic meter to the home screen so you can see at a glance the mic is picking up sound.
Settings: Camera
- Image stabilization: smooths shaky handheld footage. Slightly crops the frame; not every phone supports it.
- Dual camera: adds the dual-cam button to the HUD (front camera in a corner over the rear). The single biggest heat source in the app, so it’s off by default with a warning. Leave it off unless you need it.
- Mirror front camera (shown with dual cam on): the corner cam is mirrored like a selfie by default; turn this off so text in frame reads correctly to viewers.
Settings: Overlays
Add graphics on top of your broadcast. Three kinds:
- Text, including live tokens that update on stream.
- Image: a logo, a frame, any picture.
- Web: any web page (alerts, chat widgets, info panels), or a local HTML file.
Position each with a grid or exact X/Y, reorder the layers, and name them.
Live tokens in text overlays get replaced with a live value each second:
- Free, no permissions:
{time},{date},{day},{battery},{bitrate},{stream_time},{compass}. - GPS-backed (need location permission, use more battery):
{speed},{speed_mph},{altitude},{lat},{lng},{heading},{city}.
Settings: Chat
- Show chat panel: read Twitch, Kick, and YouTube chat on the phone while streaming. It’s only on your screen, never burnt into the broadcast.
- Channel names: your Twitch and Kick usernames, and your YouTube handle. YouTube chat connects once your channel is live, and it reads an unofficial interface, so it could stop working if YouTube changes things; your stream is never affected either way.
- Text size and panel width (compact, wide, half-screen), and which side of the screen it sits on.
While live you can scroll back through chat; a “new messages” pill appears if you’ve scrolled up, tap it to jump back to the latest.
Settings: Break & stealth
- Break screen (BRB): the message or image shown full-screen (with audio muted) when you tap the HUD BRB button.
- Stealth mode: options for the screen-off mode, an optional recording dot in the corner and a haptic pulse so you know it’s still streaming.
Settings: Reliability
- Local recording: save a copy of the broadcast to the phone (Movies/Roam). It keeps recording through reconnects, so a dropout never loses the moment, and stops itself (never the stream) if storage runs low. About 1 GB per hour at 2500 kbps.
- Auto-reconnect: how long Roam keeps trying to reconnect after a drop before giving up.
- Keep long streams alive: asks Android to leave Roam running in the background (some phones, Samsung and Xiaomi especially, kill apps mid-stream to save battery).
Thermal management runs automatically and tells you what it’s doing with a banner: as the phone warms it caps the bitrate; if it gets properly hot it caps it harder and turns off dual cam; at dangerous heat it blacks the screen to shed heat, and only stops the stream as a last resort. It always degrades visibly rather than silently.
Settings: OBS
- Pairing: host, port, and password to connect Roam to OBS over WebSocket, so you can control OBS from the HUD. See the home-OBS guide.
- Sync OBS streaming with Roam (default off): when on, GO LIVE also starts OBS’s broadcast and End Stream stops it. Off lets you send the feed to OBS without broadcasting, so you can set up your scene first.
- BRB scene: the OBS scene the HUD BRB button switches to when OBS is paired.
Settings: Help & about
- Diagnostics: save a log of what the engine did to your Downloads, for bug reports. It never includes your stream key.
- Backup: export your settings and overlays to one file, or import them back (handy when moving to a new phone). Your stream URL and OBS password stay on the phone, they’re not in the backup.
- Updates: Roam checks roamlive.app once a day for a newer version, and can check on demand. It sends nothing about you.
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