Qik Goes Legit on the iPhone
By Harry McCracken | Friday, August 14, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Livestreaming service Qik finally has an app available on the iPhone App Store. (A version for jailbroken iPhones already existed.) It’s good news, but not without a major gotcha: The App Store version of Qik doesn’t permit you to stream live video from your phone to Qik’s site. It does, however, allow you to record video with an iPhone 3GS which is then instantly and automatically uploaded to Qik (along with your GPS location), as well as share it via YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Which is useful in and of itself, and similar to the tactic taken by competitor Ustream to get into the App Store.
The biggest limitation of this Apple-approved version of Qik is that you can only upload via Wi-Fi, not 3G. Qik says it’s submitted a 3G0-enabled version of the app to Apple, though. That one should be a decent stopgap until the day comes–I’m an optimist and assume it will-that Apple lets developers write apps that stream video on the fly over 3G.
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August 15th, 2009 at 1:24 am
You’ve got to love Apple’s App Store. Only in the App Store can you find a live-streaming app that doesn’t stream live, and only uploads over Wi-Fi. I just don’t understand why, if customers are paying for a 5GB bandwidth cap, Apple’s so willing to block useful services that would enable people to use the data they’re paying for.
If anything, AT&T should be pushing Apple to approve stuff like this. They could make a fortune from massive overage charges when people guess wrong about how much bandwidth they’ve used in a given month. Then, they could use all that money to build a real network.