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Not content with being the creator of yet another iPhone app sent to the rejection bin, Brian Meehan—a developer from Pointy Head Software—sent an impassioned plea directly to Steve Jobs to rethink Apple’s rejection of their live video streaming app, Knocking. Soon after, word came “directly from the top” to get their app approved, and it’s now available for free on the iTunes store.

Knocking uses private APIs to handle their live video transmission, and this being a no-no with Apple, the app was subsequently rejected last month. Speaking to Ars Technica, Meehan discussed his thought process for composing the letter to Jobs:

When it was rejected, I decided not to give up and reach out directly to Steve Jobs via e-mail. I reached out to Apple to reconsider our application due to its potential to culturally change how people share live moments phone-to-phone. [He argued] in a way that was not about me or our app, rather about being a life-long user of all Apple products, about how I believed in Apple and that I believed Jobs would respond.

He also ended up pointing out how other apps have been approved with the private API that Knocking was rejected for.

This event is groundbreaking for quite a few reasons, but primarily it shows that Apple is finally paying attention to developer complaints. The approval also makes Knocking the first Apple approved app using private APIs, as well as the first live video streaming app that works over Wi-Fi and 3G. The fact that the app streams live video from iPhone to iPhone (and not broadcasting to the web for multiple viewers) also probably made it an easier pill for Apple to swallow.

Check out a video of Knocking in action below:

[Source: Ars Technica]