VantanIn developmentYour cameras, with no company in between.
Vantan is an iPhone and iPad app for watching the IP cameras you already own. You choose the camera's make, Vantan fills in the settings and tests the connection before saving, and from then on the video goes straight from the camera to your phone over your home network. It is in development and not yet on the App Store.
The problem
Your own cameras should not need anyone else's servers.
Vantan is built on one idea: video from your own cameras goes from the camera to your phone, and nowhere else, unless you choose otherwise.
Adding a camera usually means finding its stream address and settings by hand. Vantan asks for the make and does the rest.
What we built
Add a camera by its make
Presets for 47 makes fill in the settings, and the connection is tested before anything is saved.
Live view that recovers
A live picture that reconnects on its own, with a photo or clip saved straight to Photos.
Recognition on the device
An iPhone or iPad pointed at a room recognises a person, a pet, a crying baby, a smoke alarm, breaking glass, a knock, shouting or barking, and says what happened in a plain sentence. Nothing is uploaded to do it.
Areas and lines
Areas to watch, areas to ignore, and lines with a direction, drawn straight onto the picture.
A plan of the home
A floor plan and a 3D model that show what each camera can see.
Talk back
Speak through the cameras that support it, and look back over seven days of activity.
Under the surface
The engineering
- 01
Swift and SwiftUI, with VLCKit for camera streams and two packages of our own: stream decoding with AVFoundation and VideoToolbox, and encryption with CryptoKit.
- 02
Recognition runs on the device, with Apple's Vision and SoundAnalysis frameworks.
- 03
Camera passwords live only in the Keychain, camera addresses are kept off the screen and out of the logs, and the app can add to Photos but never read them. No adverts.
- 04
Its own component system: a switch that stretches as you drag it, sliding selectors, hairline-edged cards and camera tiles led by the picture. Every stock control went after a design audit of 134 findings.
- 05
The logo, the app icon and the illustrations are drawn in code, and every animation respects Reduce Motion, Reduce Transparency and Low Power Mode.
- 06
A cloud tier is in development. It sends nothing unless it has been paid for and agreed to on that device, after a screen that says what is sent, what we can see, that it is stored in the EU, how long it is kept and how to delete it. It is end-to-end encrypted: the server stores and forwards what it cannot open.
Not yet released
Vantan is in development and not yet on the App Store. Everything above works in development builds unless it says otherwise.
Services this drew on
More work
- Our productVizi PlayerA media player for iPhone and iPad that plays the playlist a person already has. It comes with no content of its own.
- Client workDubai meal-plan marketplaceRebuilding a Dubai meal-plan marketplace: a new back office, customer app, website and API, and menus that load themselves from partner kitchens.
- Our productLinkACodeTurns a server address into a short code, like AB123456. Give out the code instead of the address.
- Our productVVS PanelOur foundation for client back offices: a React design system for admin panels built around each client's own data and roles.
- Our own toolFrontalA private AI operations assistant: mail, renewals, deadlines and system health in one phone app, with a local AI model that sorts, drafts and flags.
Start a project
Tell us what you are building.
A few lines about the problem is enough to start. We reply within one business day.