The situation is that the device is locked and lying around until the user grabs the phone to peek on it. When he does that peek, is it possible to detect the event that your iOS device is picked up in the background of your App?
I'm thinking about the event which the system obviously provides, internally at least, for turning on the screen to display the time and notifications on that peek event.
iOS does not provide such a public API.
More generally, iOS won't provide any API that could let your app know about user actions on the system or on other apps due to the sandbox even more if your app is not active:
For security reasons, iOS places each app (including its preferences and data) in a sandbox at install time. A sandbox is a set of fine-grained controls that limit the app’s access to files, preferences, network resources, hardware, and so on. As part of the sandboxing process, the system installs each app in its own sandbox directory, which acts as the home for the app and its data.
A few exceptions to this rule exists, like Locations updates.
Related
I am working on one project and I want to get other application usage time. apple has launched iOS 12 and provides the new feature Screen Time. I want to know is there any way or API provided by Apple to get data from it.
No, on iOS each app runs in its own sandbox and cannot see data from other apps, even apps from the same publisher. An app can access special shared data, like photos from the album or contact data, but it is not possible for an app to directly access files written by other apps.
ScreenTime application is on another sandbox than your app. Unless apple provide API we can't access the same.
Update
Since apple have added screen time app into ios12 simulator. There could be a chance they provide the API's soon.
On iOS 15 Apple has added an API, see here:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/FamilyControls
FamilyControls
Authorize your app to provide parental controls on a
child’s device. To authorize your parental controls app, use a shared
AuthorizationCenter instance. You can authorize parental controls only
on a device that is part of a Family Sharing group and signed into a
child’s iCloud account.
You must add the Family Controls capability to your app.
This seems to provide functionality to parental control apps only. In other words, it cannot be used by other time-tracking or productivity apps at the moment.
I'm managing few iOS devices, so I want to create a app to add security feature like collecting the user information from the user like UserID to track which user is currently using the device .
Desired output:
So I want to trigger my app as soon as a user unlock the device and without giving the details the user should not able to access the home screen of the Device.
Is it possible to do it with any framework in iOS without Jailbreak ?
No its not possible. iOS does not allows application to manage device with it self. Application should work in the pre given area which is called Sandbox. So its not possible to handle the entire device and you can not check it that who is using the device.
This is not possible, you should look to Mobile Device Management solutions and rather go that route. You could also look at apple's business solutions.
Is is possible to dynamically figure out the position of an app's icon on the home screen of an iphone/ipad?
Sorry I don't have enough credit to comment yet so I'm posting here.
To my knowledge no you cannot natively or easily do this. I know of no open source or other libraries. The reason being that your app exists in its own world, it is not in touch per say with the rest of the device. It can get permissions to read and write data but it doesn't know of itself.
Does that make sense?
When you open a website it cannot know which tab it is in the browser. Instead it knows how it was accessed and what device (physically) is using it. It knows the user-agent, the time, the browser, etc because that is information sent to it in the request. In turn the phone on launch gives data to the app in how to handle it but not for example how many other apps are running, or where it is on the screen. It's not normally considered relevant to run time. In addition it's a security feature in preventing an app from deleting or altering other apps, as well as itself. If you have an iPhone you will notice that SIRI cannot turn off google maps navigation or any other non-apple specific app. Only apps natively comparable and private party ones (ex apples) are accessible because Apple did that intentionally. They all know of their own existence and each others. However non-native in the sense of apps that do not come preinstalled and manufactured by the company creating the device are less trustworthy, in addition there are no guarantees about how they will be run by the device, where they will be, or what other apps will be there.
It is true that an app can request for another app it may be comparable with but it is up the user to handle that information.
May I ask for curiosities sake why you are trying to do this? Are there any other workarounds?
However in terms of it being physically possible, yes. I doubt that apple allows independent developers to do this however. But an example of this occurring may be gridlock where a user can move their apps around differently on the screen. The app in this case has the ability to access app position. But I believe in this case app position is about the UI and not about nested files. apps cannot to my knowledge modify information outside of their own file. Imagine if you had an app that could edit other games scores.
It is not possible to dynamically find out the position of an app's icon on the Home Screen (even for jailbreak apps). Apple wants you to respect the user's privacy settings.
Extra Info - There is popular JavaScript library that adds a promo bubble to the bottom of your mobile web application, inviting users to bookmark the app to their device's home screen.
just to be more specific, I would like to know more about the system files that can be accessed with regards to a jailbroken phone.
From what I understand, each ios application has its own sandbox. A phone has root access once it is jailbroken, allowing creation of 3rd party system applications which result in accessing the system files. However, if I am not wrong, the sandbox is still there just that it has lesser restrictions hence allowing accessing of system files?(not sure about this part too).
So for a jailbroken phone, what kind of critical system files are we able to access from our created application that will go through the sandbox and which are not accessible from a unjailbroken phone? Is contact list a part of the critical system files, although I believe we are still able to get contact list without a jailbroken phone using the Address Book frameworks.
I may be wrong, but my term of Critical system files refers to system information that normal users would not like others to get hold of so I was thinking if contact list is part of it even though it does not require a jailbroken phone.
Without taking Tweaks into consideration, an app is able to read/write/execute in the root directory /. Tweaks are able to do whatever they want (just like the app would - even an Apple pre-installed app), depending on where they are hook-ing. For example, a tweak I was working on for MobileSMS (the SMS app) can give me the passcode of your iCloud account stored in the keychain by default.
Long story short, jailbreaks equals zero security for an average user. On the other hand, there is only one exploit (at least to my knowledge) currently, that attacked iOS and came from GeorgiaTech a few months ago, hidden in an app on the App Store.
Can we able to make show preview off.In Settings-->messages-->show preview--> ON/OFF, this is the action we have to perform programmatically.
This falls outside of your application sandbox. From the docs:
The Application Sandbox For security reasons, iOS restricts
each application (including its preferences and data) to a unique
location in the file system. This restriction is part of the security
feature known as the application’s sandbox. The sandbox is a set of
fine-grained controls limiting an application’s access to files,
preferences, network resources, hardware, and so on. Each application
has access to the contents of its own sandbox but cannot access other
applications’ sandboxes.
You may find a way to do it, but it's an absolute no-go unless you're developing for jailbroken devices. If you do find a way to accomplish this and plan to submit to the App Store, Rest assured, Apple will find this functionality in the review process and would reject it based solely on this functionality.