Mobile

Mobile

Obsidian on iOS and Android runs in a constrained WebView, so a few things behave differently from desktop.

Screen-off during recording

Mobile WebViews suspend (and stop MediaRecorder capture) when the screen sleeps. To counter this, the plugin holds a screen wake lock for the duration of an active recording on both iOS and Android, so screen-off mid-recording is largely mitigated on supported OS versions. It is best-effort: on older WebViews, in an insecure context, or if the OS denies the request, it silently falls back, so keeping the screen on (or using the Paste tab with an OS-level dictation keyboard) is still the safe habit. The trade-off is that the screen stays lit while recording.

Encryption on mobile

If your Obsidian version provides secret storage on mobile, keys use it just like on desktop. Otherwise the plugin prompts you to set a passphrase before any key can be saved, and keys are then encrypted with Argon2id/PBKDF2 AES-GCM. The secrets.json.nosync file (which holds encrypted keys only in passphrase mode) uses the .nosync suffix so iCloud Drive skips it; for other sync tools, see Secrets and sync.

Recording size limits

Each transcription provider enforces its own ceiling. OpenAI Whisper and Groq are the tightest at 25 MB; AssemblyAI, Deepgram, and Rev.ai allow gigabytes. These are provider-API limits, not Obsidian ones, and are most likely to bite on long mobile recordings with the 25 MB providers. See per-provider limits in Providers.

Local whisper.cpp is desktop only

The plugin-managed local whisper.cpp server spawns a native child process and is unavailable on mobile. The option is hidden from the mobile profile's provider dropdown. Use a cloud transcription provider, or a remote OpenAI-compatible transcription server, on mobile.

Keyboard and layout

The plugin pins its popups to the top of the screen on mobile so they stay visible above the soft keyboard, and trims a few input sizes (for example the Paste box renders shorter) so submit buttons stay reachable. No configuration needed.

Profiles

The plugin ships separate Desktop and Mobile profiles so you can, for example, use a local stack on desktop and cloud providers on your phone. Each device auto-detects its profile; you can override which is active in Settings, Active profile. See Settings reference.

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