Why iPhone videos won't play on Android phones

The file is almost certainly HEVC (H.265) video inside a .mov container, which is what an iPhone records when Camera is set to High Efficiency. Android's own media specification does not list .mov as a supported container, and it only guarantees HEVC decoding inside MP4 or MKV.

Converting the clip to H.264 in an MP4 container fixes it on every Android phone, and unlike a workaround it survives being forwarded again. You can convert HEVC to H.264 here in the browser without uploading the file anywhere.

Two problems stacked in one file

People usually assume there is one thing wrong. There are two, and they fail independently, which is why a fix that works on one Android phone does nothing on another.

The container. An iPhone always writes .mov, the QuickTime container, no matter which codec it records. Google's supported media formats list for Android names MP4, Matroska, WebM, 3GPP and MPEG-TS. QuickTime is not on it. Individual phones and apps often open .mov anyway — Samsung's gallery usually manages, VLC always does — but nothing in the platform requires them to, so support is per-app and per-vendor rather than something you can count on.

The codec. HEVC decoding has been required of Android devices since Android 5.0, but the requirement is narrow: Main Profile, Level 3, and only inside MP4 or MKV. Level 3 tops out well below 1080p60, and Main Profile is 8-bit. An iPhone shooting 4K, or 1080p at 60 fps, or HDR video in 10-bit, is producing something far outside the band every Android phone must handle. Whether it plays comes down to what silicon that particular handset has, which is exactly the lottery you have been losing.

What Android actually supports

Read the table the way a phone reads a file and the fix picks itself: H.264 inside MP4 is the only combination that is both on the list and inside the guaranteed decode envelope. That is the target for every conversion in this guide.

Check what you have before you convert

Thirty seconds of checking saves you converting the wrong thing. The file extension tells you the container and nothing about the codec — a .mov can hold H.264 or HEVC, and those two cases need different work.

• On the iPhone that shot it: open the clip in Photos, swipe up on it, and the info panel names the codec — HEVC or H.264.
• On a computer or the phone the file landed on: drop it into the converter on this site. It reads the header locally and reports container, video codec and profile, resolution, frame rate, duration and audio codec before you commit to anything. There is a longer walkthrough in the guide on how to check a video's codec without installing anything.

Two outcomes:

• HEVC in a .mov. The common case, and the one that needs a real conversion. Nothing can turn HEVC into H.264 without re-encoding the picture.
• H.264 in a .mov. Less common, and much better news. The video stream is already the one Android wants; only the wrapper is wrong. A MOV to MP4 conversion can then copy the streams straight across into an MP4 without touching a single pixel — near-instant, and bit-for-bit identical to the original.

Converting HEVC to H.264 MP4

Use the HEVC to H.264 converter on this site. It runs FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly inside your own browser tab, so the video is never uploaded, and once the page has loaded it keeps working with the network switched off.

1. Get the file onto the device with the browser — AirDrop to a Mac, a USB cable, or a cloud folder. Downloading it to the Android phone itself works too; the tool runs in mobile Chrome.
2. Drop it in and read the file summary it shows you. Confirm the codec really is HEVC.
3. Leave the quality preset at Medium unless you have a reason not to. Medium is a constant-quality setting, so the output is only as large as the footage needs.
4. Convert, then send the resulting MP4 rather than the original.

Be realistic about the cost. HEVC to H.264 is always a re-encode, never a copy, so it is not lossless and it is not instant. The browser build is single-threaded: a 720p clip runs at roughly real time, 1080p slower than real time, and long 4K footage is genuinely impractical. Files above 2 GB are refused outright, because a 32-bit WebAssembly heap cannot address them, and above about 300 MB the page warns you that it needs roughly three times the file size in free memory.

For a two-minute clip off a phone, that is a cup-of-tea wait. For a forty-minute 4K recording, use the phone app instead — it uses the hardware encoder and has no size ceiling.

What does not fix it

Most of the advice on this topic is wrong in a way that costs you an afternoon.

Renaming .mov to .mp4. This is the most popular suggestion and the most misleading. MP4 and MOV are both ISO base-media containers and share a great deal of structure, so a player that sniffs the file rather than trusting the extension may well accept the rename. But renaming changes no bytes inside the file. If the video stream is HEVC, it is still HEVC afterwards, and a phone with no HEVC path still cannot decode it. When the rename appears to work, the file was H.264 all along and the extension was the only obstacle.

Lowering the resolution or the frame rate. Shrinking a 4K clip to 1080p sometimes helps, which is why the advice persists, but only by accident: it drops the file under the decode level the phone can manage. It is a coin flip, it throws away detail permanently, and it leaves the file in a container Android never promised to open. Frame rate matters even less. If you do need to normalise a variable frame rate for an editor, that is a separate problem with its own fix.

Assuming a silent video is the same fault. If the picture plays and the audio does not, the video codec is fine and you are looking at an audio track the device cannot decode. The guide on a video that plays with no sound covers that case, which needs a different conversion.

Stopping it happening again

If you are the one sending the videos, change the source instead of converting after the fact.

On the iPhone, open Settings → Camera → Formats and choose Most Compatible. New recordings are then H.264 with AAC audio, which is the combination Android has handled since the beginning. The file is still a .mov, so the container issue remains, but H.264 in a .mov is the case that nearly always plays and the case that converts to MP4 by a straight stream copy. High Efficiency roughly halves file sizes, so this is a real trade — leave it on if storage is tight and convert instead.

How you send matters as much as how you shot. Messaging apps re-encode what you send them and generally produce something Android can open, but they also compress hard; the guide on preparing video for WhatsApp explains what survives that trip. Sending the original file untouched — cloud link, email attachment, USB — is what preserves the problem intact.

Converting on the phone itself

Most people reading this are holding the iPhone that made the file, and moving it to a computer to convert it is the annoying part. The Video Converter app for iPhone takes clips straight from the camera roll, converts them with Apple's hardware encoder — far faster than any browser on long or 4K footage, with no file-size limit — and hands the result to the share sheet so you can send the MP4 immediately. The first conversion is free; further conversions need the paid upgrade. There is also an Android version, unlimited and free, for converting files that have already reached an Android phone.

If you would rather do it on the iPhone without an app at all, the guide on converting MOV to MP4 on an iPhone covers the built-in routes and where they run out. And if the same file also refuses to open on a Windows machine, the cause is the same codec with a different symptom — see HEVC video that will not play on Windows 11.