The instant replay app

Israeli-designed ‘Past Recorder’ allows you to revisit what you just said

Your child’s first words; that awesome guitar riff; the shopping list your wife just rattled off – Do you ever wish you could replay something you just heard? With the new “Past Recorder” app – you can.

The smartphone application, launched by two Israeli childhood friends, Danny Vassa and Michael Zakai, hit the app store earlier this month. This is the first project the pair, who went to high school together, have collaborated on under the name Ajeera Apps.

When turned on, Past Recorder is constantly recording in the background, and saves the past 10 minutes of whatever it has picked up. If, within 10 minutes, you realize you wish you had recorded something, you can enter the app and save any portion of that conversation or music.

“We’re both musicians, and we use it a lot for jams,” Vassa told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday. “You pick up your instrument and play and only afterward you think – oh I should have recorded it.”

Zakai, Vassa said, has also been using it “because his child is now saying his first words.” And he said he also found it handy last week during a fender bender, where the other person involved admitted to the accident before recanting and disappearing.

Of course, it’s understandable to have some concerns that your phone will be recording at all times.

But, said Vassa, “privacy is one of our main concerns.”

He explained that the application has no connection to the Internet, and the recordings are only stored “on the device it is installed on – there is no server online, you will be the only one with access to these recordings.”

In fact, he added, using the app blocks the microphone permissions of many other applications on your phone, including Waze, Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter and others. Those apps, he said, “are basically listening to you all the time to use in targeted advertising.” Those applications are, by default, granted access to your microphone, though they deny that they activate it or use it for advertising purposes.

Vassa doesn’t deny that the free application does use up a fair amount of battery life, since it is always running in the background. But he said it doesn’t use up that much memory, since it only keeps the past 10 minutes, and continuously deletes everything before that.

“You never know when to record,” he said, “but when it’s recording all the time then you have the option to just listen to it.”