I have a need to update my managed app running on a large amount of iPads without any user interaction. These devices all have the managed app locked in Single App Mode. As I understand it, it's an iOS limitation that an app cannot be updated if either of the following conditions are present:
The app to be updated is in the foreground.
Any app is locked in Single App mode.
With our use case, both of these conditions are present. I also understand that the current workaround is to do the following:
Disable Single App Mode.
Enable Single App Mode for a different app (e.g. Safari) to bring that app into the foreground.
Disable Single App Mode.
Update app.
Re-enable Single App Mode for your app when the update finishes to bring it back into the foreground.
While this method works, it has a lot of drawbacks:
It's highly manual, we have not found a way to automate it. This is especially a problem as the number of devices becomes large. Internet connections can be spotty and there is no robust way to ensure that each step has executed for all devices.
It's prone to failure. Especially between steps 4 and 5 above. It seems there are little to no guarantees of when/if an update was successful to know definitively when to re-enable Single App Mode.
It fails for devices that are offline at time of update. If a device does not have internet connection when the update is executed, there is no way to guarantee that the steps execute fully and in the correct order the next time the device comes back online.
I am looking for a scalable solution to reliably update my managed, Single App Mode app running on thousands of devices in an automated way with no user interaction. I am using Meraki for an MDM right now, for what it's worth.
With iOS 11.2 you can now push a silent update to a device with it running SingleApp mode.
Apple failed to mention this to the public but is included in the beta notes.
Called Enterprise Support today, They could not find any official documentation mentioning ios 11.2.x supports the updating of apps while in single app mode :(
Now with iOS 11.3 beta it is working again but after updation, app is not automatically locking in Single App mode we have to restart device.
Hope in upcoming beta's this issue will get addressed.
iOS 13.1 beta 1 seems to fix most of the issues I have been having in this area.
I had seen issues in iOS 11-12.* where updates sometimes worked, but sometimes showed a pin-pad even though no passcode or guided access code was set, or otherwise behaved strangely.
In the 13.1 beta 1 you can push an App update and nothing will happen on the device, but if you send a restart command afterwards the device will restart, update the App and continue in single app mode.
I have tested with both 'Single App Mode' (SAM) and 'Autonomous Single App Mode' (ASAM) and it has worked every time for me so far.
This works for my use case as you can push the update anytime and schedule the restart at suitable time when the device is not in use.
edit: 13.1 beta 2/3/4 changes this, now when you push an update from your MDM the App will close, update and re-open and continue in single App mode. I checked both SAM and ASAM both now update without the need for a restart.
Related
I don´t see any problems like crashes or that the DAU number has changed, but App Store Connect shows 3 times more deletions since the release date of iOS 13. Now I don't know if there is any problem in the App or if Apple has made an upgrade of the "App-Offloading" mechanism? So it would be good to have some feedback, if the app deletion numbers have changed for somebody else as well.
Low-memory phones are prompted to delete all apps before the upgrade.
One of my colleagues has a 6S that is chock-full of photos. When she upgraded she was told that all of her apps would stored in the cloud but deleted on the phone, to make room. After the upgrade, she still had all the app icons, but those were really just shortcuts to re-download each app anew.
Apparently this also kills notifications, because without the app on the device there's nothing to execute the notification.
I have that message in App Store Connect:
App deletions data was reported incorrectly for iOS and tvOS as of
August 2019. This data has been removed from the dashboard for
reprocessing and will be re-enabled once reprocessing is done.
See attached screenshot:
There are previous topics about waking up an application from the background with BLE advertisement (e.g. How to wake up iOS app with bluetooth signal (BLE), Android / iOS - BLE - wake up a terminated application when a BLE device connects).
However my question is not about that since we had this feature working fine up to iOS 9.2 included.
Coming iOS 9.3 the feature doesn't work as it used to work before, it seems that the terminated by user swiping off the application is not woken up. Nothing changed on the BLE advertisement originator.
After a recheck of various parameters and reading of Apple documentation, nothing springs to our minds. Neither Apple documentation mention any change, unless we missed something.
Have other people notice this issue? Are you aware of a solution?
We wrote to Apple and we are pending on an answer but maybe somebody here has the correct tip.
Many thanks in advance for the attention.
UPDATE: After more testing, it seems that only when the user swipes the application out the wake up doesn't work like it used to in iOS 9.2
Initial testing were more manual and gave us the impression that there was an underlying issue. However not sure why this change took place without any notification from Apple. - Above text was amended based on the update -
UPDATE 2: This issue is not present anymore in iOS 10.
It turns out after a reply from Apple that this is a (new) intended behaviour.
didEnterRegion/didExitRegion events stopped working from the background after update to 9.3
I have an app that has been working almost perfectly for the last 6 months, and after the update these events are no longer getting called. I started this app over last year when I heard about iOS9 coming out, and when I couldn't get the old one working, I started a new one using Swift instead.
After some time and a LOT of driving in and out of my Region, I got the app to work more reliably than it ever had before. I have several devices using the app, and when all of them updated to iOS9.3/9.3.1, the app stopped calling didEnterRegion/didExitRegion events completely.
I have a ticket open with Apple, but I am getting a lot of push back about the service, and that 9.3 didn't change background location at all.
My devices use AT&T of Verizon, we have tried wi-fi assist on and off, I even wiped a system, formatted the HD, installed El Capitan, and XCode 7.3, and it's hasn't helped.
I also found an issue with the Devices Tool, and when you download the Container, and open package, the Documents folder is empty. I'm not getting a warm fuzzy feeling for Apple right now, and I am sure someone is feeling my MEGA MIND WEDGIE at this moment.
Help....
I am building an app targeting iOS 8.0 that needs to download files that are up to 250Mb. I had a version of the download code roughly working using Alamofire but I recently replaced that with a pure NSURLSession implementation. This new implementation is working as expected in the simulator and on my iPhone 5S running iOS 9.2 (13C75). It works on my phone whether I install through XCode and a physical connection or through TestFlight. I have deleted the app, restarted the phone, and reinstalled and it always completes downloads correctly. One of my colleagues pulled the code and was able to successfully simulate it from XCode.
However, downloads fail on all of my collaborators' devices. They are installing the app through TestFlight and are set up as internal testers. One collaborator also has a iPhone 5S running iOS 9.2 (13C75). The Alamofire-based implementation worked as intended when deployed through TestFlight to those same devices and very little other code has changed.
I have added some remote logging and I can see that on the failing devices, downloads are correctly triggered and the download tasks I create each have a taskIdentifier which I can log. However, none of the NSURLSessionDelegate or NSURLSessionDownloadDelegate methods are called.
What suggestions do you have for troubleshooting?
Is it possible that this could be related to a TestFlight problem? My current next step is to try an alternative to TestFlight. Ultimately, I would like to be able to deploy betas through TestFlight if possible.
I'm using Swift 2.1.1 in XCode 7.2 (7C68).
The problem turned out to be that I had set the NSURLSessionConfiguration discretionary property to true. The docs state the following which sounded good to me:
When transferring large amounts of data, you are encouraged to set the
value of this property to true.
But I failed to appreciate the consequences of the rest of the text:
For example, the system might delay transferring large files until the device is plugged in and connected to the network via Wi-Fi.
The reason that installations through XCode were working was presumably that the phone was either being charged because it was connected to my computer when I started a download or had just been charged.
I initially suspected that the problem came from either TestFlight or something about the state of the phone. Remote logging with Sentry (which I already use for the backend) was very helpful for getting some insights into what was different when my collaborators ran the app. I eventually added in implementations for all the NSURLSessionDownloadDelegate methods to log which ones were called. This led me to see that didReceiveChallenge was the only delegate method being called and I then spent some time thinking that it could be an auth-related problem and troubleshooting in that general area.
Finally, I started noticing that my own install would fail sometimes and one collaborator had a successful download. That made me start thinking about the kind of phone state that could prevent a download. I went back to the NSURLSession configuration that I had and that's when I read about the discretionary property.
In retrospect, carefully checking the configuration would have been a good step to do earlier. Another good thing to do would have been to log the state property of the download tasks that were created.
Newbie here, so apologies if this is stupid question:
Are there any applications or solutions out there that would allow you access to debugging events on an app installed on your iphone? To be clear, this isn't an app I've developed, it's just on my iphone and is used as part of another solution which we are developing. Curious if there's a way to just watch the events on an app to help with debugging process.
Thanks.
If you make an app, and build it with a development release, and development signing, you can select to build+run it on a device. Then, you can use the Xcode debugger to see your logs / errors etc.
Steps:
Plug in iPhone
Start Xcode
Hit Build + run
Watch debugger
Logs are either made by the OS for certain things (NSinconsistency, bad constraints, race conditions in view presentation) or by you with NSLog.
Or did you mean when the app is not tethered to your computer? There are other tools for that - including just plugging the phone back in and downloading the logs off the device.
Ive submitted my first app and it has been approved. But I have a few issues that i'd like to ask what I should do about.
One of my images/icons that I have in my app showed correctly in my distributed binary at my end (running it in debug simulator from xcode) but on the app downloaded from the app store it is not showing at all?
IPads cannot see my app in their search of the app store?
IOS 4 is needed to run my app. How do i change it so that it can be run on IOS 3 aswell? And if i make it IOS 3 compatible does this mean that it cannot be run in the background at all (i.e. when the close out of my app and go back into it will it restart the entire app)
Also does anyone know whether submitting an update is quicker in the review process than submitting a entirely new app?
Thanks in advance for your help
Thats a QA issue. The simulator is just that and if you want to be sure that your App runs as you expect on hardware then you need to check it on hardware. There are instances of images that decode on simulator but not on hardware.
iPad only runs iOS 3.2 at the mo so if your app runs on 4.0 it wont show up for iPad.
See 2 and no you dont have multitasking in 3.2 so you need to make sure your app state persists across atomic launches. You'll need to remove/conditionally compile any 4.0 only API in your App. If thats a problem wait until November-ish.
Maybe, depends, probably no. Lead time on update/new submission is around 8 days +/- YMMV.