As of the new 3D Touch capabilities with the new iPhone 6s/6s+, I'm trying to add some home screen quick actions to my app.
I was able to implement the normal flow of force touching the app's icon in the home screen -> choose one of the quick actions available -> taking care of it properly in all possible app states.
My question is: Is it possible to create a silent action among the available quick actions? By silent I mean that a certain action will take place, yet the app won't complete its launch? Or alternatively launch but won't be in foreground?
UPDATE
I'll elaborate on what I'm trying to achieve - I want to have similar behaviour to the one HealthKit offer with its background delivery - where upon a change in the store, HealthKit wakes my app and give me a chance to do something in the background (with HealthKit example - query for the new data in the store).
After reading much of Apple's documentation on the topic I have the feeling it is not possible with the current API available - but I hope someone will surprise me...
Nope. The user invoking a home screen Quick Action always activates the app.
If your app was already running and is suspended, it comes to the foreground and your app delegate gets the application:performActionForShortcutItem:completionHandler: message. If your app has not been running (i.e. has not been run since install, or was previously backgrounded/suspended but later purged from memory), it launches and your app delegate gets the application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: message and then the application:performActionForShortcutItem:completionHandler: message. (So, your did/willFinishLaunching handler needs to check the options dictionary for the possibility of launch via quick action.)
Either way, your app comes to the foreground.
Related
I have a group email app where customers create emails in a standard iOS compose window. If they write a long email, then switch apps to do a memory intensive task, iOS may close the compose window, losing the contents of their email.
Is there a way to prevent the window being closed? or a way to ensure iOS saves the email to drafts before closing it?
I am wondering if I am not retaining a link that I should be, perhaps?
Can anyone else confirm whether they see the same problem?
The best way to do this is to understand the App Life Cycle on iOS.
When the App is running in background, the method applicationWillTerminate will be called, this is one of your options to save the content of the email. But this method is not called every time, it is only called when your app isn't suspended or when the user reboots his device.
One solution is to save this data inside the method applicationDidEnterBackground, it is called as soon as your app starts to run in background. And reload the data inside application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions, this allows you to perform any final initialization before your app is displayed to the user.
Is there a way to prevent the window being closed? or a way to ensure iOS saves the email to drafts before closing it?
There's nothing you can do to prevent the window from being closed, because iOS is killing the app. What you can do is to save the email at some point before that happens. Since the user obviously can't modify the email while the app is in the background, saving the message when the app goes into the background would be a good choice. That way, you'll have the data saved if iOS does end up killing the app, and you can check to see if there's a saved message that needs to be restored when the app launches.
If you take that approach, though, you'll also have to figure out a way to help the user get back to their saved message, which means that you also need to keep track of how they got there in the first place so you can recreate that state. If it's just a simple message, maybe all you need to do is to open a message editor view and set it up with the saved message. In general, though, this can be a thorny problem. Luckily, Apple has provided a nice solution...
The View Controller Programming Guide for iOS has a section called Preserving and Restoring State, which explains how you can set your app up to automatically save and restore its state. With a relatively small amount of work, you can set your app up so that the user will never even notice that the app has restarted -- if they launch it after iOS has killed it, the app will recreate the view controllers so that it looks like the app was running the whole time, even if the device was shut down in the interim.
As of the new 3D Touch capabilities with the new iPhone 6s/6s+, I'm trying to add some home screen quick actions to my app.
I was able to implement the normal flow of force touching the app's icon in the home screen -> choose one of the quick actions available -> taking care of it properly in all possible app states.
My question is: Is it possible to create a silent action among the available quick actions? By silent I mean that a certain action will take place, yet the app won't complete its launch? Or alternatively launch but won't be in foreground?
UPDATE
I'll elaborate on what I'm trying to achieve - I want to have similar behaviour to the one HealthKit offer with its background delivery - where upon a change in the store, HealthKit wakes my app and give me a chance to do something in the background (with HealthKit example - query for the new data in the store).
After reading much of Apple's documentation on the topic I have the feeling it is not possible with the current API available - but I hope someone will surprise me...
Nope. The user invoking a home screen Quick Action always activates the app.
If your app was already running and is suspended, it comes to the foreground and your app delegate gets the application:performActionForShortcutItem:completionHandler: message. If your app has not been running (i.e. has not been run since install, or was previously backgrounded/suspended but later purged from memory), it launches and your app delegate gets the application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: message and then the application:performActionForShortcutItem:completionHandler: message. (So, your did/willFinishLaunching handler needs to check the options dictionary for the possibility of launch via quick action.)
Either way, your app comes to the foreground.
I have an iPhone app that I need to send to the background automatically. The app is defined with the VOIP key in its background modes so it should continue running when in background. I specifically need the app to keep running so calling exit(0) is no good.
The app will not be distributed via app store so using a private API is ok.
I have read about UIApplication terminate and UIApplication terminateWithSuccess but they don't seem to be available anymore
Already answered quite well here:
Suspend the application
As that poster wrote:
Quitting your application or sending it to the background programmatically is a violation of the [iOS Human Interface Guidelines][1], which usually doesn't bode well for getting through the review process:
Don’t Quit Programmatically
Never quit an iOS application
programmatically because people tend
to interpret this as a crash. However,
if external circumstances prevent your
application from functioning as
intended, you need to tell your users
about the situation and explain what
they can do about it. Depending on how
severe the application malfunction is,
you have two choices.
Display an attractive screen that describes the problem and suggests a
correction. A screen provides
feedback that reassures users that
there’s nothing wrong with your
application. It puts users in control,
letting them decide whether they want
to take corrective action and continue
using your application or press the
Home button and open a different
application
If only some of your application's features are not working, display
either a screen or an alert when
people activate the feature. Display
the alert only when people try to
access the feature that isn’t
functioning.
In Swift 3 Use below code, working charm
DispatchQueue.main.asyncAfter(deadline: .now()) {
UIApplication.shared.perform(#selector(NSXPCConnection.suspend))
}
While I agree with the other answer that you "shouldn't" exit programatically. There is a way to exit programatically.
*disclaimer - You shouldn't do this.
exit(0);
There is no way to put the application into the background without pressing the home button. If there is, you might want to add the jailbreak flag to your question and ask them.
For more, check this duplicate question, Proper way to exit application.
We have a customer who wants us to have our iOS app check for new data posted every night and download it if it is available. As far as I can tell this is only possible if the app is already open or if they have someone physically accept a notification or initiate the process themselves.
Is this correct? I can't imagine Apple wanting to allow launching of an app and downloading data with no user interaction at all.
Yes, generally you can only download data at exactly specified times if the app is actually running in the foreground, that is correct. It wouldn't matter if the app was open already or the user opened it from a notification, the point is that user interaction is required. So, the client can't have exactly what they want.
Look at background downloading (fetch) from iOS7+ where you can register the app to perform background downloading in advance of usage. iOS is fully in control of this and it may choose to run the app and it may not. iOS will monitor when your app is usually used by a particular user and, if appropriate, it will allow the app to run in the background to do some downloading before the user is expected to use the app.
In particular you're looking at setMinimumBackgroundFetchInterval: and setting the UIBackgroundModes key with to fetch in the Info.plist.
As an aside, here's an idea based on your expanded information:
Use idleTimerDisabled to prevent the app from sleeping during main usage and keep a track of the time
After the main usage period of the app is over, start your downloads
After the downloads are done allow the screen to sleep
On the next day, if a user opens the app, repeat
It isn't perfect, but it's an approximation
I have an iPhone app that I need to send to the background automatically. The app is defined with the VOIP key in its background modes so it should continue running when in background. I specifically need the app to keep running so calling exit(0) is no good.
The app will not be distributed via app store so using a private API is ok.
I have read about UIApplication terminate and UIApplication terminateWithSuccess but they don't seem to be available anymore
Already answered quite well here:
Suspend the application
As that poster wrote:
Quitting your application or sending it to the background programmatically is a violation of the [iOS Human Interface Guidelines][1], which usually doesn't bode well for getting through the review process:
Don’t Quit Programmatically
Never quit an iOS application
programmatically because people tend
to interpret this as a crash. However,
if external circumstances prevent your
application from functioning as
intended, you need to tell your users
about the situation and explain what
they can do about it. Depending on how
severe the application malfunction is,
you have two choices.
Display an attractive screen that describes the problem and suggests a
correction. A screen provides
feedback that reassures users that
there’s nothing wrong with your
application. It puts users in control,
letting them decide whether they want
to take corrective action and continue
using your application or press the
Home button and open a different
application
If only some of your application's features are not working, display
either a screen or an alert when
people activate the feature. Display
the alert only when people try to
access the feature that isn’t
functioning.
In Swift 3 Use below code, working charm
DispatchQueue.main.asyncAfter(deadline: .now()) {
UIApplication.shared.perform(#selector(NSXPCConnection.suspend))
}
While I agree with the other answer that you "shouldn't" exit programatically. There is a way to exit programatically.
*disclaimer - You shouldn't do this.
exit(0);
There is no way to put the application into the background without pressing the home button. If there is, you might want to add the jailbreak flag to your question and ask them.
For more, check this duplicate question, Proper way to exit application.