Should and event store's requestAccess(to:completion:) be called
as early as possible (e.g. in application(_:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:)
only before EKEventSource should be used for the first time?
Does Apple recommend one or the other option (for iOS 10)?
Why nag the user any sooner than necessary?
A user will be more comfortable if the request for permission comes when they actually try to do something they know requires access to the event store.
If you request permission too soon, the user is going to wonder why the app is asking when they haven't even done anything with the app yet.
And what if your app needs access to multiple sources such as camera, photo library, contacts, and events? It would be terrible to just nag the user over and over for all of them up front. Only ask when the source is actually needed and the user probably fully understands that the action they just took (like take photo) requires the specific permission.
Related
I'm taking a look at the new requestReview() API that uses SKStoreReviewController. The documents state:
"Although you should call this method when it makes sense in the user experience flow of your app, the actual display of a rating/review request view is governed by App Store policy. Because this method may or may not present an alert, it's not appropriate to call it in response to a button tap or other user action."
Does anyone have any experience using this API. What exactly are the factors that determine if the rating view is shown or not? I'm guessing it's not shown if called too frequently.. Anybody have any insight on this? Thanks!
You're right that it won't show if called too frequently.
SKStoreReviewController will only allow prompting a user to review your application 3 times at most, even if you ship more versions than that during the year.
There might be more restrictions beneath the surface as well.
Source: http://daringfireball.net/2017/01/new_app_store_review_features
According to iOS Human Interace Guildelines
The system automatically limits the display of the prompt to three occurrences per app within a 365-day period.
I was attempting to use apple's HealthKit authorization modal in my App's settings, to allow a user to toggle their info on/off for sharing. It automatically pops up the authorization screen. However it seems to only do it once and then never again. At least until 24 hours later maybe, where it will prompt again if needed.
Is this meant to be used similarly to PushMessage requests, where a user is prompted once and then not ever prompted again from the same request?
I'm skeptical to add this modal prompt in the App's initial load as it is quite intrusive as a full screen modal; even if called only once ever.
Basically the user suppose to see it once (as when asking to grant push notification permissions, or access to contacts).
I have found out that for each datatype you want to share with Health app (or read), you got one shot with the modal prompt. This prompt might be a bit tedious to the user as it shows the entire types your app ask for permissions (both read and write), and I assume this is why Apple said a best practice of HealthKit is to ask the entire permissions your app need at the same time (though some might argue with that in a matter of UX).
If you wish to ignore Apple suggestions of this best practice, you can ask for read/write permissions for each datatype separately - Doing so will result prompting that modal sheet each time you ask the permissions to a different type.
In the bottom line, this permissions sheet is meant (by Apple) to be shown to the user once. You can find a way to pass that limitation (yet for a limit amount of times - depends on the amount of datatypes available), but I won't recommend bypassing Apple's guidelines (it is never a good idea).
A trick to use is to modify the Share/write types in your authorization, this will require the user to look at it again, thus pop it up every time.
We would like to be able to remotely control an app on an iOS device so that the app can be automatically brought to the foreground WITHOUT the user having to do anything, for example when the app receives a remote push notification. My understanding is that normally there is no way to bring an app to the foreground in iOS unless the user presses a button, because Apple has decided that it knows best, and that it is better for app developers and users not to have this possibility, because it could be abused.
We are working on a security-related app where we believe that there would be strong justification for this type of functionality (in a case where the user is not able to take any actions).
Two questions:
Is there any way to do this in iOS coding that others on similar posts have overlooked?
Does anyone have experience with whether Apple ever grants exceptions to this kind of rule if there is a good justification?
The answer is simple: NO, and there is no chance that Apple will agree to allow you to implement such functionality. The only app that does this is the Phone.app because that is its purpose.
I am developing an mobile app for iPhone. The app will primary used by people who are on holiday in a different country and will be offline most of the time, due to high costs for internet traffic.
However, the company for which I am developing the app wants to users to be able to use the "Facebook Share" functionality also when people are not connected to the internet.
It should work on a way that they click the SHARE link button in the app, but then get a message that they are offline and the link will get shared as soon as they are online again.
I am trying to figure out how to do this. Can I pass the link I want to share to the official FB App via fb:// protocol (or whatever) and the FB App handles the post/share as soon as it is online again?
Or do I have to do it on my own, put the links I want to share in a internal database and then post them to the wall when I am online again?
Or any other ways??
Any suggestions would be welcome, I would prefer a very quick solution and hope someone maybe has an idea how to do this. I was hoping I can pass the share-link to the official FB App and this one handles everything when it goes online again !?
Thanks for your ideas!
Your approach should be to make your link-sharing code automatically cache requests until they are sent. The app then doesn't need to concern itself with the details - it can just post the link and get a 'failed', 'success', or 'postponed' response from your API and notify the user accordingly.
Your link-sharing code can then internally check if it can currently post to FB and if not (either because the user is currently offline or perhaps the Facebook token is expired) it will store it for later. This class will then re-check periodically (for example when the app comes to the foreground or when the class is initialised the next time the app starts) for connectivity and then it will check if the token is still valid and perform FB login if required. Once it has a valid token it can then iterate through the pending requests and act upon them.
If you really want to make it nice and clean, you can separate out the code that accepts incoming requests to do something, checks if it can be performed now, does it or stores it for later, and periodically checks any requests in the pending queue. This class will not have any idea what the requests do or how they are performed, it will work with another class that implements a protocol to do the actual work and knows about facebook, etc. There may even be an existing design pattern for such a setup, but I don't know what it's called if there is.
Update: I did some research and found this is very similar to the "Fire-and-Forget Pattern".
Flock is a reasonably new iOS app from the guys at Bump, which has an interesting feature. It somehow knows when photos have been taken by another app, notifies the user (in a notification center way), and asks the user to share them into an album. There are other interesting features of course, but I'm particularly interested in this feature for another app that I'm working on.
I can't see how the API facilitates this directly. I looked carefully through the notifications API documentation, and apps can certainly register to show a notification to the user at a future date/time, and thus be opened by the user at that time... but I couldn't find any system notification for when a photo has been taken. The notifications API also allows server-generated notifications, but once-again, I don't know how Flock's server-side could know when the user has taken a photo in a different application.
I installed the app a couple of days back, and I only seem to get the notification when I have taken photos. It doesn't appear to be just a daily reminder.
Any ideas how Flock (and potentially other apps) manage to do this?
After a couple of days of observing the app's behaviour (and a lot of Googling and bumping into arcane discussions about file locking), I have a strong suspicion of how it works: Flock has simply registered for Significant-Change Location Service, which wakes the app and provides a small processing window when the user changes location. The documentation says:
At wake-up time, your app is put into the background and given a small amount of time to process the location data
I suspect that Flock is checking the image library at that point, and triggering a local notification if photos have been added. This squares with my experience that Flock gives me a local notification ~10 minutes after I leave home... which, in case any of the Bump/Flock devs are reading this, is just about the worst time for me to sort through my photos and share them in an album (perhaps I should use public transport more often).
There are some other interesting SO answers here, here and here... but for the most part they discuss local notifications (which can only be scheduled for a particular time, and will always alert the user at that time, so aren't really background tasks) or the 600 second background processing window afforded to apps that have been shut down by the user (which is certainly a background task, but is clearly not fit for the purpose of running a background task once a day or somesuch).
The Bump devs have also provide some clues to the underlying architecture of the app here.
I haven't used this Framework personally, but I did stumble across this documentation when doing research for a client.
Apple Photos Framework Reference
Under the Features & Concepts there is an entry for "Change Observing" which states:
Use the shared PHPhotoLibrary object to register a change handler for the photo entities you fetch. Photos tells your app whenever another app or device changes the content or metadata of an asset or the list of assets in a collection. PHChange objects provide information about object state before and after each change with semantics that make it easy to update a collection view or similar interface.
It appears that you can use the PHPhotoLibrary singleton to registerChangeObserver: on a class of yours (that adopts the PHPhotoLibraryChangeObserver protocol) to receive PHChange objects from the photoLibraryDidChange: method