The Frigate NVR client for your phone. Live view, alerts, playback — private by architecture.
App Store — coming soon Google Play — coming soonWebRTC streaming straight from your server — sub-second latency on your LAN, snapshot fallback when the network is rough.
Alerts with thumbnails, filters by camera and severity, one-tap mark-as-read, clip playback and save-to-gallery.
A motion-density timeline for every camera. Tap any slot to replay, export the moment to your photo library.
Multiple Frigate servers with per-server accounts. Switch from the title bar, like switching homes.
On iPad and Android tablets the wall goes wide — a multi-column video grid with a navigation rail and a split-view detail pane, so you watch one camera without leaving the others. Sub-streams keep a dozen live tiles smooth; drag to reorder, or go full-screen immersive.
A native Apple Watch and Wear OS companion: your latest alerts with snapshot thumbnails, mark-as-read from the watch, and a glanceable tile showing today's count. Wear OS ships as a standalone watch app; Apple Watch mirrors rich alerts once cloud push is enabled.
Kestrel is built in the open and ships steadily. Here's the honest state of things — last updated July 2026.
Kestrel is in closed testing on Google Play right now. Want in? Email pingnestapp@gmail.com with the Google/Gmail address you use on your phone and we'll send you the opt-in link. All you need is a self-hosted Frigate server and an Android device — no active use required to help the test along.
The sidecar is a tiny open-source daemon that runs next to your Frigate server — it powers pairing, notification rules and local alerts, all on your own network. One line, on the machine that runs Frigate (Linux or macOS, amd64/arm64):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pingnestapp/kestrel/main/install.sh | sudo shIt downloads the binary from GitHub Releases, verifies its SHA-256 checksum, installs it to /usr/local/bin, sets up a system service, and prints the pairing QR / 6-digit code. Prefer Docker? Build the image from source for now (a public image is coming) and run:
docker run -d --name kestrel-sidecar --restart unless-stopped \
--network host -v kestrel-data:/data \
-e KESTREL_FRIGATE_URL=http://127.0.0.1:5000 kestrel-sidecarThe sidecar, this site and the installer are open source (Apache 2.0) — read the code, build it yourself, or grab a release binary at github.com/pingnestapp/kestrel. Running Pingnest? A one-tap Kestrel sidecar entry in the Pingnest app market is on the way.
Video, snapshots, event data and notifications flow directly between your phone and your own hardware — over your LAN at home, or over your own VPN (such as Tailscale or WireGuard) when you're away. Management traffic never passes through, or is stored on, any server of ours. The one optional exception is Pro cloud push notifications, which relay a small alert payload — including one snapshot image, but never live video streams or recordings — and are off by default; snapshots are kept at most 1 day. Read the privacy policy.