I recently read about an app for the iPhone called Knocking Video. It is apparently the first app that allows live streams from an iPhone (any iPhone model) that has been approved by Apple. The story I read went on to describe the saga of it’s struggle for approval and it seems was given the thumbs up from none other than Steve Jobs.
A great story and I love the concept of the app. Unfortunately I think it is doomed to failure. There are just too many barriers in it that are needlessly going to turn off potential users.
The first problem has to do with the sign-up portion of the app. It asks for first name, last name and email. The problem is that it’s error checking is just too aggressive and bug filled. For instance my last name is two words and that wasn’t allowed. Good luck people who want to find me on the app, you won’t be able to because I had to use a last name that isn’t correct. Perhaps you could try to find me via my email address? Guess again, it didn’t allow a dash in my domain name so again I had to use an alternate.
Second, once you join you have to figure out somehow if any of your friends are already using it. There is no way to test the app (as far as I can tell) without a friend “knocking”. They should at least have an echo or testing user that people could try it with.
Since I have no way to evaluate the app, I am not going to send emails to my friends asking them to join..
Ooh yeah, I went to the help and about screens to figure out how to let the company know my issues but the email address they list doesn’t exist.. Guess this blog post will have to suffice, perhaps they’ll read it.