The Facebook Live API is a mess

I have been trying to build an app that utilizes the Facebook Live API and the experience hasn’t been awesome. There’s very little on stackoverflow to supplement the official docs.

For example, if you wanted to use webhooks (formerly RTUs) to be notified about a user’s live video activity, it won’t work unless your app has been approved to use the Live API (which is not mentioned in the docs). This, however, creates a conundrum: how to get approved before being able to test?

Furthermore, the app review documentation implies the only valid reason for requesting access to the Live Video API is to create live streams, but this omits the use case of wanting to read the live_videos edge. For example, one may want to have an app that is notified of when a users goes live with a public video and then be able to query the live_videos edge to get meta data about the currently streamed video. Currently, this is not possible.

Facebook Live is an amazing tool that developers can help make even better — if Facebook would let us.