I've developed an electron application and packaged it for windows x32. It's a standalone desktop app, and I want to make sure it doesn't communicate with the outside world. When I launch the compiled application for the first time, I get a prompt message asking me if I'd like to "Allow incoming network connections"
If i say no, I believe the app doesn't run properly as it will be added to my firewall's blacklist. Any advice on what the proper practices for achieving this are?
I want to block any incoming/outgoing traffic to/from my electron app, while ensuring tit runs smoothly.
by allowing incoming connection ,you may get trouble .as you have the Proper firewall to prevent it and you proceed
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So basically I have two iOS apps installed on the same device, and they need to communicate by sending data to each other. I don't want to use URL scheme or Universal links as these two would open the other app in UI instead of sending message to each other in the background. Currently I have a solution of using a unix socket connection by binding one app to a specific port and have another app connect to it. This works fine but I am just wondering if Apple would allow the usage of this.
Note that these two iOS apps do not come from the same developer so anything else that relies on App Group would not work in this case..
Would Apple allow using a socket in this case?
Edit: One of the app is valid to run in background, so background execution is not a problem
No, this is not possible simply because the application will lose network connectivity when it goes into background mode. I invite you to check the following Apple Developer Documentation page related to iOS app background modes:
Background Execution
As you can find on the page, the operating system suspend the app when it moves to background and will then cut several resources including network access.
There are however some exceptions to the rule, which are voice ip apps. These must declare the voip background mode in the plist file to be allowed to keep network streams open in the background.
This question comes a lot on iOS or Android and unfortunately the answer so far is no, we can do tcp client / server communication between apps.
It is totally doable as long as one of your apps has permissions to run on the background. Such example is music apps. Spotify does the same thing with their “app-remote” SDK.
I'm making use of the library GCDWebServer(https://github.com/swisspol/GCDWebServer) in a project of mine, that requires me to accept connections originating only from my application's process, for security reasons. I was hoping this is something that the iOS app sandbox would provide out of the box, but that doesn't appear to be the case. The sandbox appears to be enforced for UNIX domain sockets(AF_UNIX), by means of file-system permissions. But for TCP/IP sockets(AF_INET), used by GCDWebServer, there appears to be no sandboxing in place.
I was able to write two sample applications - a client and a server(signed with different developer certificates) and could have them communicate with each other, without any issues.
I was wondering if there was some way of enforcing the same on iOS, essentially spin up a HTTP server on a TCP socket but only accept connections from the same process. I can't make use of UNIX domain sockets, because the client which is going to request the content from the HTTP server is an AVPlayer and it wouldn't know how to connect to my application's UNIX domain socket.
I'm about 99% certain that what you're asking for is impossible. I don't even think it is possible in OS X without writing a network kernel extension (and even then, it would be challenging).
By the time a network request reaches another process, it has passed through the networking stack and has lost any notion of what process originated the connection (unless this has improved fairly recently).
Realistically, the closest you can get is binding to a random port on the localhost interface and tearing it down as soon as your app gets put into the background.
Pedantically, if you managed to somehow convince Apple that you planned to build a VPN, it is theoretically possible to abuse the VPN API in such a way that would let you provide a private network that worked only within your app. It would not, however, ever be allowed in the app store.
But why would you ever want to do this? AVPlayer is more than capable of playing from a file URL.
There are many ways you could do that: you can inspect the incoming request in GCDWebServer and decide if you want to respond to it or return an error.
You could add a secret header other apps wouldn't know about, sign the entire request with a secret key, etc...
I work with web analytics and have somewhat of a web developer background, BUT I am not a programmer. I need a way to debug the tracking code I request our mobile app team to implement. They are also not Web Analysts so they struggle to be able to verify if it works too.
I need a way to take one of their builds, run it on a desktop environment, and monitor it with a network monitoring tool like Charles Proxy or the network monitoring tools in the developer tools of most browsers.
I want to at least be able to see the information being passed back to our analytics tracking tool via the network connection. That will tell me if what I requested works or not. If there are other tools that a non-programmer can use to achieve this and more I would be grateful to hear about them. The few tools I have seen seem to be more about testing web pages via a mobile device. I need to test apps that you will eventually download from the an app store.
Thanks!
In our company, we found that Charles is perfect for testing all that concerns tracking.
Charles will record all your requests and responses from your computer, SSL traffic included.
(You can also let physical Android/iOS devices use your desktop as a proxy to catch all traffic there, which is even more impressive and useful, but I understand that this is not what you want.)
You can even do fancy stuff like throttling your connection and adding breakpoints, to see what would happen in "real" situations with bad connection...
Hope this helps.
I need to view some local (saved somewhere in the iPad) html / js contents with mobile Safari. By reading some threads it seems that the file:// protocol is disabled. Right?
If so, the solution I see is to install an app which turns the iPad into an http server (no need for support of php or anything else), load my contents there and access somehow them within the same device by http://localhost/... or http://127.0.0.1/... with mobile safari.
Is that actually possible? Can someone please suggest me a good web server app which possibly does not require jailbrake or other hacking?
Thanks!
You probably can't do what you want because in order for your application to be serving up HTTP requests to Mobile Safari, it would have to be running in the background, and there's no permissible background mode that covers this.
If you only need a one-time-only response immediately after running your application, then you could possibly use beginBackgroundTaskWithExpirationHandler:, although this might not be approved by Apple - it's difficult to predict their response to that.
If you are sure that you don't need this to go into the App Store, then you can get your application running in the background permanently by abusing one of the other background modes, such as pretending to be a VOIP app or media player.
Once you're running in the background, you can use CocoaHTTPServer to actually serve the files.
If you describe what you are trying to achieve, somebody might be able to suggest an alternative approach to using local files / Mobile Safari.
I develop an enterprise application for iOS and the user should be able to add files from the desktop to the application.
I implemented this using filesharing, which works great.
Now this company wants to get rid of iTunes from their machines (which is quite understandable, iTunes is a very invasive process).
The question is, is it still possible to somehow use filesharing without iTunes? maybe with another application?
Or what other way is there to send files to the app (preferrably without the need of an internet connection)
//edit: must work on windows 7 and must not require to install iTunes (there are some other tools that allow access to the iPad filesystem, but they go through drivers installed by iTunes)
You could exchange data via the local wireless network (a connection to the internet is not required, just the iOS device and the Windows computer need to be on the same network).
One option:
You can then create a simple TCP/IP connection over sockets between an iOS app and a Windows application and exchange the data you want.
However you probably need to implement a suitable simple Windows application to do this.
An other, maybe simpler, solution:
You could start a webserver in your iOS-App and show it's IP on the screen. By entering this IP in a browser on the desktop computer you can access websites on the iOS device, which can make documents available for download or receive uploads.
For how to do this, have a look at this question.
There are a number of ways to achieve this, ranging from trivial to sophisticated.
Your question says that you would prefer to avoid an internet connection. Simple solutions may require it - if you want to abstract the difficult parts, you're going to have to let somebody do the dirty work, and that's probably going to be someone(thing) on the internet. Midrange solutions may require a network but not internet connection. A sophisticated solution could probably be whatever you want - but one thing I would say, is that trying to tap into the USB connector is either going to result in a hacktastic or very complicated solution to implement.
One method would be to integrate a third party framework that basically does what your looking for. Look at the Dropbox development kit, for example - allowing Windows (or any platform) users to drop files on their desktops into a shared dropbox, and this can then be read by an iOS application which includes the iOS drobox API.
Another method would be to setup a simple WebDAV server in your office. Host it on a windows box, or a cheap linux box. Give users desktop's access to the share via whatever protocol you want (eg, Windows File Sharing). Then you'd implement a WebDAV client in your app (eg, WTClient) to pull files.
Finally, you could build your own transmission system. A sophisticated example might involve Bonjour and TCP/IP, a simpler-but-custom solution may involve a simple JSON web service running off a local (or remote) server.
I have suggestion but that will require the Internet. I would suggest you to use the DropBox API in the windows and iPhone both. It's awesome to use and very simple for file sharing.
Now a days everybody have dropbox account and have files in it to share. So that shouldn't cost anything other than a bit of implementation (this learning can also be used in other file sharing applications).
Here are some guidance:
iOS
REST API
You can add apps and documents to USB-connected devices with the Apple Configurator
You may use a simple Ftp server installed on PC, so you can connect to server from Ios and upload/download files from iOS to PC....
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Networking/Conceptual/CFNetwork/CFFTPTasks/CFFTPTasks.html
All work is done by Pc and your app will use IP (Intranet or Internet) of PC to share all files.
From Ios you can read all files in FTP server and work with them.
I use the FileBrowser app to get access to network shares over WiFi and will allow you to load supported files to the device. The company responsible is creating an API to allow you to do this within your own app: https://twitter.com/#!/Stratospherix/status/193114857271336960