Jobs personally approves live video streaming app rejected for private API use

In many ways, Pointy Head’s Knocking Live Video is exactly the sort of app Apple likes to march out in parade. The app allows any iPhone user to rap with figurative knuckles on the iPhone of anyone else with the app installed. Once notified via push that someone’s knocking on their handset, Knocking Live Video opens up, streaming live video between both iPhones.

It’s a neat idea: exactly the sort of simple, social and fun communication tool Apple and AT&T like to highlight in their “There’s an app for that” ads… whether or not — in practice — it is just likely to be used as a spontaneous pornographic transmission tool amongst frat bros out birddogging as to transmit video of your kids at the pool to a traveling spouse.

The only problem? Knocking Live Video uses Apple’s private APIs to achieve its live video streaming.

That’s a big no-no: Apple’s private APIs aren’t static, and Apple doesn’t want apps built upon them, lest they break between iPhone OS updates. With the App Store approval process recently being partially automated to detect just such private API use, it was just a matter of course: Knocking Live Video was soundly rejected for inclusion on the App Store.

Pointy Head developer Brian Meehan didn’t leave it there. He wrote Steve Jobs himself, pointing out other apps approved with the same private API call, and humbly asking for him to demo the app and reconsider it for approval. The whims of Jobs are mercurial, but in this case, it paid off: within a few days, Knocking Video Live was up on the App Store, approved “straight from the top.”

That’s probably not a good thing: while Knocking Live Video has a lot of potential, it’s distressingly buggy right now. But it does show that there is at least some recourse for app developers who feel that they’ve been wronged by the Approval Process: take your plea up the mountain.

• Via Ars Technica

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