How can I open my app directly from the iOS Share Sheet? - ios

Update: don't have time yet to test provided answer, but will keep this answer updated as I try different things.
In the iOS 14 Simulator, when I open the share sheet and click their Share Target, the Apple News app is launched immediately and they check if the shared URL has been added to their index.
My question is how are they launching their app immediately without any user interaction?
A gif is worth about 100,000 words: https://giphy.com/gifs/HPzTNyWGDDMVwASQ9z
I would imagine it may be some combination of registering a Universal Link and then programmatically triggering that from the Share Extension View Controller, but I’m wondering if anyone has any better ideas.
A couple of other places I've asked:
Swift Subreddit
iOS Programming Subreddit

This is just an open URL call to a news app. Prior to iOS 14, it was named as copy to app name.
To achieve this you need to specify the supported document type for your application in plist using key CFBundleDocumentTypes.
Refer to apple documentation for more info:
https://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/current/#/devddd273fdd
There is a change in share sheet option listings.
case 1: When your application doesn't support any kind of extension. And have supported document add to plist. Your application will appear in the share sheet for supporting documents. On tap, your application gets an OpenURL call with the URL of the document shared.
case 2: Your application supports share extension or action extension, then your open URL call option for your application will not appear in the share sheet. if the share extension and action extension activation predicate are not satisfied and the document shared is supported by your application that option will appear the same as case 1. (Summary: if share extension or action extension is listed in share sheet then open URL option will not be listed.)
Note: Limitation of openURL call is, it supports only a single URL. For example, you are sharing multiple files, your application OpenURL option will appear. But on tap, your application will receive only one URL.
If your requirement is sharing only a single URL and your application doesn't have a share extension and action extension. Then key CFBundleDocumentTypes is your friend.

Related

Is there a way to present users an option for which app to open when multiple apps use the same universal link? [duplicate]

I have two apps under same firebase project, those share the same deep link
How are links handled by the OS if more than one App can use the same universal link? How do I choose the app that is going to be opened to handle certain pages?
for example, both apps share same universal link https://xxx.app.goo.gl
how will it be identified to open user or manager app?
According to Apple, this is dependent on the ordering of your AASA file.
The order of the dictionaries in the array determines the order the system follows when looking for a match, so you can specify an app to handle a particular part of your website.
The app that is listed first in the AASA file will take precedence. You can check that by looking at the AASA endpoint: https://xxx.app.goo.gl/apple-app-site-association
You can also specify certain paths to be handled separately, but if both apps share the same paths then the one listed first in the AASA will open.

How to call out to another app within an app - iOS

We use an LMS calles Canvas by instructure. Our students access the LMS via the iOS app, however we would like to be able to call out from this app to another app (e-book reader).
We just want to be able to select a link which will redirect us to the app.
We have a coder in our staff, and we would really appreciate any advise on how to achieve the above.
You can communicate with URL Schemes between apps Apple Inter-App Communication
And here is Tutorial explaining URL Schemes implementation.
If you have access to the e-book reader app's codebase, this is simple to achieve by specifying a URL Scheme this app may respond to (or, alternatively, if you happen to know what URL Schemes this app supports). Then it will be as simple as calling out a URL of a corresponding format from within the iOS app your students use.
Alternatively, if your app provides access to the documents of some sort, you could look into UIDocumentInteractionController that can add "Open in..." functionality to your app, allowing app users to open a document in an arbitrary app that supports this file format.

How to show all apps receives strings in "Open In.." menu?

I'm totally new in iOS development. I'm developing an app processing some strings in UItextview. After the process, I want show "Open In.." menu with all applications can receive text values.
To explain more. What I mean is like this in Android http://developer.android.com/training/sharing/send.html
I took a quick look at the link you posted.
Apple enforces a "sandbox" around apps which greatly limits what you can do.
Off the top of my head here are a few ways to do it:
Define a custom URL scheme in each of your apps. One app would open a URL using the other app's URL scheme, and that would open the other app and pass it the URL.
For a family of apps from the same company you should also be able to set up a common base "bundle ID" and use that to read and write shared entries to the keychain. The keychain is limited to fairly short bits of data however. (It's intended for password strings and the like.)
I haven't used it before, but you should also be able to use the UIDocumentInteractionController class to pass a copy of a document between apps. As I understand it, the sending app presents a document and asks the user to pick an app with which to open the document. When the user picks a target app, the system creates a copy of the document in the target app's documents directory and then tells the target app to open it.

How to share a link from the app using other applications

I want to share a link from my app using other applications installed on my iPhone such as Gmail, Facebook, DropBox, WhatsApp etc. In android there is a straight way to do so, just fire an intent and it automatically shows the installed apps through which we can share whatever we want. Is there any such way in iPhone ?
Thanks!
On iOS , app is more separated from each other. The only way to pass data from one app to other is using the URL mechanism. As one example, an app register url scheme "open-me://",you invoked openURL with "open-me://my-link" then that app will launched. That app will define the detail of the URL so it could understand the content.Continue with the example we are using, the text you passed could be either "open-me://A?data=my-link" or "open-me://A?message=my-link". So there are no general solution for all apps.Typically third party app will provide a SDK to make these things easy.
If you don't mind using a kind of large third party library, ShareKit is a good choice. It supports quite some apps.
If you want to know more about this topic,for example sharing files between app. You could start from reading the class reference of UIDocumentInteractionController.This UI component will show a list of app installed on your device which support the URL scheme.

Is there a list of iOS apps that can be called using custom URLs?

It is possible to launch your own app via custom URL scheme as described at http://iosdevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-application-via-a-custom-url-scheme.html for example. Is there a list of the apps that use this mechanism somewhere already? A list of custom URLs available to date? If you have or know an app that uses this mechanism, adding it here will also help.
See http://wiki.akosma.com/IPhone_URL_Schemes
http://www.onemillionappschemes.com, an open source Custom URL scheme site where you can contribute URLS (by scanning your iTunes library) and where you can pick up everything that has been found so far

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