Open Radar

 
Context: in this article about the recent shooting of Philando Castile:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/08/castile_shooting_police_deletion/?mt=1467994873326

See also:

https://twitter.com/jameswidman/status/751528159649075200

... with which several users appear to agree.

... it's reported that "officers seized her phone and took over her Facebook account to delete the evidence."

The general problem is that, when a user tries to record/stream important evidence, a corrupt authority or other aggressor may get hold of the device while it is unlocked and then delete data from a remote server and/or destroy the device so that locally-recorded data cannot be recovered. Also, in a scenario like this, battery life is even more precious than usual, because it's important to be able to record & stream video for as long as possible.

iOS has a partial solution to this in the form of Guided Access, which enables the user to quickly enter a mode where the touch screen and the power & volume buttons are disabled. It's a good start, but there are still some problems:

 - Guided Access does not provide battery-saving options (e.g. to put the display to sleep while a camera app is still recording and streaming over the internet). 

- The default Camera app on iOS doesn't seem to have built-in streaming support.  Instead, users have to rely on 3rd-party apps. Normally, that's fine, but in a scenario like Castile's, all users should have the ability to quickly and easily start a public video stream (and I don't care much whether it's via YouTube or iCloud or Twitch) and notify people in their contacts with the URL of the stream. (This is important, because e.g. a corrupt police officer could just destroy the phone, and with it all locally-stored video files.)

- There is no cross-platform solution.  Normally, I'd respect the need of Apple to differentiate from Google, but hopefully we can all appreciate that in cases like this, a common vocabulary for common features across platforms could easily affect whether a user is able to find the appropriate features in time, and consequently make the difference between justice and injustice.  So, for example, there is nothing called "Guided Access" on Android, and that could be a serious problem in scenarios where users may need to start streaming as quickly as possible.  So I implore you: please do the right thing.  Do the right thing by collaborating with your counterparts at Google and any other smartphone OS teams, so that when users want to learn about features like "Guided Access" (which, initially, they will NOT know by that name), the user only needs to do ONE search to find what they need to know, regardless of whether they're on iOS or Android or anything else.  We really need co-operation rather than competition here.