Open Radar

 
Summary:
Lookback provides an SDK that records user experience research sessions. This means that the screen, camera and microphone are all captured at high fidelity and uploaded to our site lookback.io, in order to study user reactions and interaction problems (with the user's consent, of course).

This is an area where it is obvious that UIKit's APIs are designed for use by an app collaborating with other apps, and is sometimes not at all suited for use by an SDK, since there is no way for UIKit to discern usage from the SDK, from usage from the hosting app. (Hint: XPC services would make sense for a lot of these cases :) )

One such area is camera and microphone capture. It seems to be assumed that one single app will never accidentally open a camera twice, and that doing so is a programming error that is just not handled by the frameworks. Therefore, interruption notifications and error callbacks are simply not called, and the situation is undetectable.

However, when Lookback is trying to capture the user's experience (by recording the front-facing camera), and the user activates a camera feature within the hosting app, this conflict arises. If Lookback captures the microphone, and the user activates *any* sound or music feature, the same problem arises.

What I request is:

* An API that captures the camera, and if the app opens the camera, that I can simply piggy-back on this connection instead and keep using the camera (no matter if it's front or back); or at least get a proper notification that recording has been interrupted instead of stream just not delivering any more frames while device says everything is fine.
* An API to capture the microphone that does not interact with audio sessions at all, and so does not interrupt music playback, is not interrupted by music playback or sound effects; and preferably like above piggy-backs on any app usage of the microphone instead of just shutting it down.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Record camera and/or microphone (let's say with an imaginary setting that says the capture is not exclusive)
2. Start yet another camera and/or microphone capture from another part of the code

Expected Results:
3. The first recording automatically piggy-backs on the second recording, OR there's at least a notification that there has been a recording interruption

Actual Results:
3. No notification and no error; samples are just no longer delivered.

Version:
iOS 8

Notes:


Configuration:
iPhone, iPad

Attachments: