I am orientating on developing an app to synchronize all pictures taken by the iPhone camera.
I searched quite a lot and can't find much about the hardware event for the camera shutter on the iPhone.
Is it possible like the android CAMERA_BUTTON BroadcastReceiver in the manifest, to listen if the camera button is pressed in general, without the app being specifically launched?
Or an overlay on the existing iOS camera app?
Update 02-05-2018
I din't managed to get a direct detection of the camera button, also no ongoing detection from pictures take from the camera(PHPhotoLibraryChangeObserver). When the app is killed, all listeners are also killed. I am however using this when the app is booted up with the locationchange mechanism
In the end I used the Using the Significant-Change Location Service to get the detection of the changed pictures to synchronize, ongoing. I used the NextCloud and OwnCloud as examples, which were containing this part.
Using the Significant-Change Location Service
The capturing of images and videos is an entire software related process managed by classes in the AVFoundation framework. The entire hardware of the iPhone is not accessible for applications and you cannot monitor the use of hardware directly. There are some system frameworks, but these won't help you. The AVFoundation doesn't have any notifications that it will post to registered observers.
All captured images and videos are put in the Photos library and the Photos library has notifications when something changes in the library. You can register your application as an observer for changes in the Photos library and you can specify the changes you want to observer. You can also collect the specific changes that have happened and have your application handle the changes in the Photos Library.
What I don't know is whether you can use this as a remote change and have your app being launched by iOS when it registers for that change in the Photos library. I do know that you can program your app to launch on reception of notifications, but I don't know if this can be done with this change observer. I would suggest to give it a try.
Hope this helps.
Related
Is there any way to implement an iOS app that has access to the screen (e.g. screen recording) also when it's backgrounded? Has anyone experience with this?
Apps like TeamViewer do this, but it's not clear to me if they went through a special process with Apple (e.g. a non-open API).
P.S. I am of course assuming that the user would have to explicitly accept this (e.g. like for system extensions on macOS), the goal here is not to make a malicious app but a remote-control tool.
The only way to record the screen in the background is by using the broadcast upload extension in ReplayKit 2. This WWDC talk goes into more detail around how to use this API https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/601/
Since it's not specifically designed for your use case you will have to do some things differently like locally storing the frames in your App Group instead of uploading them.
I'm doing research for my company as we consider how to make our app work on iPhone. I'm looking for a list of iPhone sensors/measurement tools that can run in the background at the command of an app. Internet searches are not proving helpful, so I'm turning to the experts here.
I'd like to know if the following iPhone features in particular can be run in the background of the phone via an app:
Hall Sensor (used for electronic compass)
Proximity Sensor
Motion Sensor/Accelerometer
Gyroscope
Frequency Sensor
IR (infrared)
GPS
Camera
Microphone
Ambient Light Sensor
Again, I want to know if these features can be activated by an app to run in the background of the phone. Thank you.
There are 5 kinds of apps that are an exception to the rule:
Audio: Allowing users to use radio apps like Pandora, InstaCast in the background while they’re using iPhone’s Safari browser to surf the web etc.
VoIP: This will allow VoiP apps like Skype to run in the background so that it users can receive and make calls even when they’re running in the background.
Location: Apps that need to constantly track your GPS coordinates can now run in the background while you listen to music or surf the internet.
Newsstand apps that are downloading new content.
Apps that receive continuous updates from an external accessory in the Background.
I have a question about running an app in the background.
I know about how to do it, but Apple does not like the way I'm doing it.
To get you on the same page, I have a security app, and I need to it monitor the device even when it is in the background. It is sort of like a burglar alarm.
I was using background audio mode, thinking it would be okay because I will be playing a sound when it is triggered. Needless to say, Apple didn't like that.
So I added a ping! It pings while active, therefor playing background audio while in the background.
Once again, they didn't like that either.
My app monitors the accelerometer as well (but not always, only when chosen by the user).
My question is, how are apps like Skype, and other similar apps able to turn the status bar red, and stay in the background? (Even some alarm apps will do this, without playing any audio or anything).
Also I can't use the notification system because it does not update fast enough if I'm monitoring the battery level. For my app I need immediate response.
I have also searched around tirelessly for this answer before I posted my question (the answers I have found, do not work for me..) :(
I would greatly appreciate any insight on this, Thanks in advance!
(If you need anymore information, please ask!)
From what I can tell from their documentation, it seems that the only way you can maintain a persistent background connection is by using one of their seven background mode keys, which I can see you've been trying since you registered for background audio. I know some alarm apps as well that use this feature (e.g. Sleep Cycle), and my assumption is that they are also using background audio mode, considering the other six modes are not remotely close to what they would need it for.
I think Apple's reasoning might be that these apps are allowed to do so, because their app is designed to be used when the user is not using the phone actively (i.e. when they're sleeping), and requires the audio to wake the user up, whereas if you are running a security app that wants to be active at all times, it may interfere with other features the user may use like Skype. The red bar will also persist at the top of the device at all times when the user is using it, which they may mistake for something that is still playing since usually when a red bar appears it means to the user that they are still actively using something. Again, I think wake-up alarm apps and others like them that aren't using persistent audio are able to get away with this since they are designed for use when the phone is inactive, so having the persistent red bar when the app is not visible is less of an issue.
In some other cases, like Nike+ (discussed here) and likely pedometers, they seem to be using the location background mode, since they often also track where you went and need to know distance. In that discussion I linked to, it looks like others were able to get accelerometer updates by registering for a background mode that applied to them. Have you tried registering for location movements? One downside I can see to that is it might drain battery life quicker, but if you check location infrequently it might not be too bad? Another is that I don't think you can directly play audio when in location background mode, but you could try to trigger a sound notification? :) That might be a nice workaround for it if that works for your app.
Again, the reasoning I have for why these apps are able to do it is just based on how I've seen other apps operating, and Apple may have different reasons for why it accepts them, but that was my best way of thinking why your app got rejected for using those modes while the others are able to do it. If location isn't what you're looking for, unfortunately I'm not sure from what it sounds like your app is doing that you'd be able to operate it continuously in the background in the way you're expecting.
Being responsive is a need for every app. Users want to have apps which have their content ready when they open it, so developers should use Background Modes to make their apps more user friendly.
Turning on the Background Modes capability
Go to Xcode and open your project.
In your app target, navigate to Capabilities tab.
Turn on Background Modes.
Background Fetch
Background fetch is a new mode that lets your app appear always up-to-date with the latest information while minimizing the impact on battery. You could download feeds within fixed time intervals with this capability.
To get started:
1- Check Background Fetch in capabilities screen in Xcode.
2- In application(_:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:) method in AppDelegate,
Reference: https://medium.com/#javedmultani16/background-modes-in-ios-3da25b9e6474
You can use background modes only if you actively use the activity that keeps the app awake: e.g. continuously playing audio is a valid use of the audio background key. They'll look pretty hard at whether you really need the access you request, and if not they'll reject you (as you've already found out), as background services drain the battery considerably more than others.
From the docs:
These keys should be used sparingly and only by apps providing the indicated services.
Short story: I think you're out of luck with your proposed implementation.
Like everyone else I'm venturing into mobile app-development and I'm looking at different frameworks / languages. The ones that look most appealing to me are Phonegap, Corona SDK and Monotouch. Objective C seems to be a little too low level. I haven't done memory management for a long time and I'm not yearning to relive that experience. But if that's where I need to go to meet the client's need, I'll go there.
The client in this case needs location aware notifications in an iOS app.
A user story goes like this: The user is out walking the town. She's got her iPhone in her pocket and is listening to music via iTunes. As she walks into her local mall my app (running in the background) detects that she is in the proximity of a branch of her bank. My app also knows that the user has some errand to do at the bank. So my app interrupts the currently playing iTunes track, plays a notification sound and puts a notification text on the screen, telling the user that there's a bank office nearby and that she might want to do that bank errand now.
Could this be done with either Phonegap, Corona SDK or Monotouch?
MonoTouch supports all types of iOS location services (standard, significant location change and region monitoring) so yes, you can do it with MonoTouch.
Whilst Apple has started bringing in geo-location notifications with the Reminders app I'm fairly certain that it won't be exposed in the higher level frameworks as of yet.
Some good info here in the Apple developer docs
There are several ways to track the user’s location in the background,
most of which do not actually require your app to run continuously in
the background:
The significant-change location service (Recommended)
Foreground-only location services
Background location services
...
All are possible with MonoTouch. Pretty sure they are with PhoneGap also. Don't know about Corona.
There are 2 iPhone applications. One application running in the foreground and the other running in the background. Is there any way to get the background application to send data over USB without coming into foreground? Ideally we want to keep the foreground app in the foreground, while the background app process some data. Once the data is processed it will inform the foreground app that the data has been processed.
No it cannot. It cannot even do this without the use of private frameworks, unless you're in the Made for iPhone program. If you are, then your organization will know, based on the documentation made available to you, what you can and cannot access, when and how.
Should you be in the Made for iPhone program, and are unclear as to what you have access to and when, contact the person in your organization who is the technical contact with Apple for this program, they will be able to give you the details.
If the task is started while the app is in the foreground and you call the appropriate beginBackgroundTask/endBackgroundTask methods, you should be able to have it continue running after the app is backgrounded.
Note that access to USB is restricted (see jer's answer) and that there's no officially sanctioned way to communicate between different apps on the same device. Also, you can only buy/download one app at a time in the App Store and I can't see Apple approving an app that required you to download a second app for it to work. So you may have bigger problems to solve first.
It would help significantly if you told us what you actually wanted to achieve. For example, "I want MyApp on the user's phone to communicate with MyApp on the user's computer".
The absolute easiest way is to send data between the phone and a computer is to require that they're both on the same Wi-Fi network. Several iPhone apps incorporate a web server (this was the easiest way of "file sharing" before OS 3.2), and many more iPhone apps connect to a computer running server software.
Your other options, more or less:
Reverse-engineer the Bluetooth side of GameKit and reimplement it on the computer-side. I'm not aware of anyone who's done this. Loosely, I think it's IP over Bluetooth PAN plus some sort of Bluetooth service discovery.
Audio input/output, e.g. the headphone jack or certain pins on the dock connector. I'm not entirely sure how the mic side works (the resistance was a bit high for a carbon mic when I checked), but you might get lucky and find a way to turn it into "line in" or find "line in" pins on the dock connector.
A webcam pointing at the iDevice screen (and the iDevice camera pointing at the computer screen). Ewwwww.
Join the MFi program.