Knocking streaming video app for iPhone, approved by Steve Jobs

December 3, 2009

Perseverance goes a long way, as a confident developer from Pointy Heads Software has recently shown. His emails to Steve Jobs have not been left unanswered, and so his company's video streaming app for iPhone, Knocking Live Video, is now the first official iPhone app capable of streaming live video over 3G and WiFi networks. The iPhone app is based on a private API, a common issue among iPhone developers, that enables it to stream video live. Its approval, by Steve Jobs himself, is a good omen for fellow iPhone developers, and companies developing video-based apps in particular. Another good thing is that developer issues registered in the App Store are actually taken into consideration by folks at Apple Inc., which must be worth at least 50 brownie points.

The Knocking Live Video app stream video from one iPhone to another. The user simply launched the app, and “knocks” on another iPhone door. That user will receive the “knock” through push notifications and once answered positively, the first user can stream his or her live video directly to them. The sender must have an iPhone 3 GS or iPhone 3G in order to transmit video, but receivers can have any other iPhone or iTouch and view the stream via a WiFi network.

This “visual tweet” as Pointy Head developer Brian Meehan called it, uses a private API that enables capturing frames live from the iPhone's screen. However, the use of private APIs, which are internal programming functions and methods that aren't approved by Apple for developer use, is implicitly a direct violation of Apple's iPhone developer agreement. As such, the Knocking Live Video was rejected a month ago for this reason.

But Meehan' confidence in the app proved worthwhile, as Steve Jobs responded to his emails. “I reached out to Apple to reconsider our application due to its potential to culturally change how people share live moments phone-to-phone.", said Meehan, who continued "in a way that was not about me or our app, rather about being a life-long user of all Apple products, about how I believed in Apple and that I believed Jobs would respond."

And Jobs indeed responded, and the Knocking Live Video app is available for free from the App Store starting December 1st. Honestly, we think it's killer app. We can record ourselves taking a bungee jump, babies' first steps, singing, flying, and stream everything live to our friends. Communication has just taken another step forward. Via ArsTechnica.

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