FaceTime is Apple’s video and voice calling service found on every iOS device and Mac. The service was introduced in 2010 with the iPhone 4, the first iPhone with a front-facing camera, and later expanded to iPod touch and iPad.
Roberto Garcia, an Apple engineer, described the origins of FaceTime in the ongoing Apple-Samsung patent trial, revealing a number of tidbits, including its codename, Venice, and that its initial technology came out of Game Center. Garcia’s testimony was important to refute Samsung’s allegations of Apple using technology from a Samsung patent to develop FaceTime.
“Code writing for Game Center turned out to be really useful for FaceTime,” Garcia said.
The FaceTime project, codenamed Venice, included many pieces, such as networking for seamless interaction. Garcia and four other engineers spent essentially all of their time on the project, and various other teams worked on pieces related to the technology. Apple’s core audio team did the audio backend, dealing with the microphone and speaker, Garcia said. The video codec team also was involved, as was the application team, “which draws pretty buttons and things like that,” he said.
Garcia says Apple’s engineers wrote “at least tens of thousands of lines of code” for FaceTime, and that the project was designed with privacy and security in mind right from the start. FaceTime calls are end-to-end encrypted and never stored on Apple’s servers.
When Apple introduced FaceTime in 2010, it only worked over Wi-Fi, and a couple of years later, the company added Cellular support as well. Last year, Apple expanded FaceTime to make voice-only calls over the internet, making it a competitor to Skype, Viber etc.
FaceTime’s voice and video quality are much better than rival services, but its only downside is the lack of availability across platforms like Android and Windows. Let us know how your experience with FaceTime has been in the comments below.
