Is there any equivalent of Android's external/public storage concept in IOS
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/data-storage.html#filesExternal
I don't want the physical external storage in iOS but at least a common public folder where multiple apps can read/write from.
Also i want to check if there is any way to share a file between two applications on a same device. My file can get huge
AFAIK with air drop i can share files between applications in different devices.
Best Regards,
Saurav
App groups can be a possible solution for your case if you are going to share data among your apps.
Otherwise creating an extension & allow user to store data in cloud storage could be a possible solution.
https://www.centerdevice.de/document-and-share-extensions-in-ios/
Related
I am new on iOS. In my application, I need to get files on the phone e.g. pdf, words etc in the phone. I know iOS application has their own sandbox to work with, they have no idea of other applications.
I have read some of the extension : Document Provider and a older post importing document through this link : https://mobiforge.com/design-development/importing-exporting-documents-ios
Is there any different between the two setup in my requirement? Sorry this is my first time working on iOS.
Unfortunately, iOS does not allows to share files storage between apps from two different developers.
If you own both apps, you can use App Groups to share data and files between apps. You can read more about App Groups, and how to use the APIs here https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/watch/working-with/app-groups/
How can I find out programmatically all the files present in iOS device and list them out to user? Also I need to download the file in my local application database?
How this can be achieved with Objective-C.
You cannot access all files in an iOS device outside the sandbox of the app. But there are other ways you can achieve this. What you can do is:
Access all the files in Gallery using UIImagePickerController.
Access all the user files in network- Dropbox/Google drive/iCloud. They all have separate public APIs that can be downloaded and used to download/upload files in network.
In this way, you can access most of the user files and use the same in your application.
Simple answer : you can't (on a non-jailbroken device).
Each app is launched is in own sandbox and can't interact with the others apps, expect using API provided by Apple for app-communication (ex: extension)
You should look at that Apple guide about App Sandboxing, which is valid for OSX and iOS apps.
The main difference between these two OS, as quoted directly from the doc :
iOS Note: Because it is not for user documents, an OS X container
differs from an iOS container—which, in iOS, is the one and only
location for user documents. In addition, an iOS container contains
the app itself. This is not so in OS X.
You cannot access all the files outside the app sandbox. But, if they are available at some shared location(network), you can use third party libraries to access them. For eg.
1. For iCloud- iOS provides inbuilt framework of UIDocument
2. For dropbox- DropBoxAPI is available
3. For Google drive- there is a separate library to access files in the drive.
Hope this helps :)
I am writing multiple apps for iPad. All these apps have some settings in common. I therefore would like to have one app that handles the settings and write them to a file - the respective apps will then retrieve their settings from this single file. Is there a way to access one file from different apps on iOS?
The iOS Keychain may help -> http://shaune.com.au/ios-keychain-sharing-data-between-apps/ though a Google search for FireMonkey APIs for the keychain has proven fruitless. At least it could be a starting point.
I'll be working on a cryptographic app for iPad soon. Along to some other features, I'd like to be able to get documents within the iPad's file system to work with them.
So far, I haven't experimented with that, but I've seen apps such as pdf readers that don't share their files with other apps and can't reach files belonging to other apps. Is it possible -and legal- to reach all the files in the iPad from an app?
Thank you very much!
No. This is not possible unless you Jailbreak your device. All applications are sandboxed and can only access files they are in the their individual sandbox.
Are separate apps able to share the same binary in a form like a DLL? I know its possible to compile static libraries but I wouldn't count these as the same as a DLL (i.e. a dll is one copy of a binary shared by multiple apps, whereas static libraries are separately included by any using app).
Is each app totally separate from each other, are there any IPC or file sharing mechanisms available for differing apps to communicate and share data?
Is it possible for an app to create a new process in addition to a new thread (I guess not)?
You can't share executable files between applications. Apple requires that all apps function standalone. However you can use a UIDocumentInteractionController to get another program to deal with files you don't understand, and a 'quick view' may be available. That's how Mail works, for example.
Programs from the same vendor can share the keychain and, I think, iCloud storage as of iOS 5, but can't share storage on disk. As they can declare supported file types, UIDocumentInteractionController can be used to push temporary access to a file from one app to another. A custom URL scheme can be used in a similar way to pass fragments of data if that helps.
As a general rule, only one user process may be active at once in iOS - e.g. background processing is essentially event based. So you can't create a second process for yourself.
You can do this if you are developing for a jailbroken phone. Not
otherwise.On jailbroken phones, you can create .dylibs or shared libraries that can be
loaded via the DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES environment var (much like on
MacOS)
Apps are sandboxed. However, there are some ways of communicating between apps. You can use
(a) customURL scheme (also mentioned by Tommy above)
(if any) associated with an app to launch an app and send some
parameters to the launching app
(b) If you control communicating
apps, then you can use Message ports (CFMessagePortCreateRemote)
(c) If you control communicating apps, you could use Darwin
NOtification center for distributed apps.
Of course the expectation for (b) and (c) is that the
communicating apps are all running. On iOS since there is only one foreground
process, you'd have to have the other as a background app and that's
restricted to certain kinds of apps on the iOS platform.
Basically, no to all of the above, unless you're targeting jailbroken phones and are bypassing Apple's App Store. If you jailbreak, I believe you have similar options to those you have in Mac OS X.