In many ways, Mobli resembles hit social-video app Vine, but, in one way, it's pretty much the opposite. Mobli features the same social following, posting, and reposting you get in Vine in a very slick interface. But instead of curtailing your visual creations to a scant six seconds, Mobli (free) lets users broadcast live, open-ended video streams to their followers or anyone in the world. Versions of Mobli are available for Android and Windows Phone as well as iPhone and iPad. I tested the iPhone version on my iPhone 5.
Live video streaming is hard to make interesting, though, as Justin.tv and Ustream made clear several years ago. That's one reason Vine is so stringent about the length of shared videos—there's not much chance of monotony in a mere six-second timeframe. But Mobli isn't just live video streaming—it also lets users post still photos and recorded videos to their timelines. In fact, Mobli's makers state that its abililty to share three kinds of content that makes the app superior. I've often found, however, that apps that do just one thing very well—such as Instagram with its square photo sharing—are usually the big winners. But maybe Mobli's three-pronged approach can buck this trend.
Interface and Watching Moblis
A few clever interface innovations find their way into Mobli, some inspired by iOS 7 behaviors. For example, as in mobile Safari, the navigation disappears as you scroll down into a page, only to reappear if you start scrolling back towards the top. This happens either while scanning your feed or another user's timeline. Another clever interface trick is the way photos on suggested accounts fly down off the page to reveal those beneath when you swipe down on them.
As with any social app, to really start enjoying Mobli you need to follow some fellow users. When you first run it, the app first tries to find Mobli users from your existing online accounts and then suggests accounts to follow. The app's first suggestion for me was Vine superstar Nash Grier, along with the Mobli team and Cameron Dallas. As with Vine and Twitter, on Mobli accounts can be private or public, but you need to dig into the settings if you want to switch to private. You can also follow "channels" that use hashtags for content, such as #HDR or #NYC.
After tapping Next, you'll get to your feed page, where pulling down with your finger loads new posts (with a clever animation at the top showing this activity). These posts can be of any of the three types of content supported in Mobli—photos, videos, or live video streams. If you just want to see live streams, you can subscribe to the #Live channel. As with Vine and Instagram, you can comment, "heart," or repost anything you see on Mobli.
Along the bottom of the screen are five buttons—an eye, a star, a camera, a flag, and your own user icon. The eye takes you to your own feed, including posts in both channels and users. The star shows you popular posts, suggested follows, and the latest posts of all kinds in its Now tab. The camera obviously lets you shoot and share your own posts, and the flag shows any notifications, such as new people following you.
Don't confuse the Star button's "Now" tab with live streaming: "Now" shows any of the three media types just shared on the service. Video quality for live video streams was spotty at times. In my testing, sometimes the timer spinner went on spinning for a while, and then I'd see a blotchy image with compression artifacts.
At other, times the video would come in fast and clear. I like that tipping the iPhone sideways displayed the video in full screen. Tilting it back to portrait mode lets you send a comment to the broadcaster, heart the show, or repost it to your profile. You can also see how many viewers a live stream has from this view. I can report that Mobli seems to be policing the content well: I didn't see anything inappropriate, as I did on first reviewing Vine.
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