Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 6 years ago.
Improve this question
Objective/ Problem: I'm beginning to build an iOS app which will have a ton of images. It's not a photo app (it's a trivia type app) so the photos are not user photos. The app-size can't be huge as then it will take a long time to download from the App Store and take up space on the phone.
Question: If I'm not an expert developer or backend developer, what is my best option for storing the photos online and retrieving them as needed with simple code?
Research:
What I'm looking for seems to fall under the umbrella of "backend". The easy answer used to be Parse, which is a BaaS company (backend-as-a-service). However, they are shutting down. There also used to be PayPal's "StackMob", a BaaS company but they shutdown in 2014.
Both Parse and StackMob were built for people like me, indie-developers with no backend knowledge. Yet, as two of the biggest services shutdown choosing BaaS as a solution is now viewed as risky.
Big companies and expert backend developers will just build their own database, load the photos onto it, and query it as needed.
Yet, I'm no expert. Can anyone let me know what replaced Parse as being the easiest/turn-key solution? After I upload the original photos, the user will never need to add/change any.
If you can make your file names unique you don't even really need a back end. You can just use generic web services. I handled a very similar problem using Amazon Web services S3 which just provides basic HTTP downloads.
I package groups of image file into
zip files and then request a download of the zip to download the group of files. I found a third-party wrapper for zip decompression in Objective-C and use that to unzip the packages into the application documents directory.
Related
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 2 years ago.
Improve this question
I am currently working on a school project and was wondering if there is an API to fetch data such as the current official top ten games from the iOS app store? I know there are websites like sensor tower where I could maybe extract data from, but I was hoping to find an API that accesses the apple store data directly rather than going through a 3rd party website. So far I've not had much luck!
Does anyone have any ideas?
Many thanks in advance!
Apple didn't launch any official APIs for accessing the App Store data.
Find below the APIs that are available right now,
1- iTunes Search API, It is for iTunes Store and Apple Books Store.
https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/itunes-store-web-service-search-api/
2- App Store Connect API, It's concerning with apps that added to App Store Connect only.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appstoreconnectapi/testflight/apps
And Check the following similar question as well,
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/347123/appstore-api-for-search-and-download
It depends on how you define "Top Games", for example:
by downloads?
by position on Top Charts?
by average ratings and/or number of ratings?
and in what countries or categories?
The easiest way would be to use a third-party API that pre-packages all those insights, for example you could use this Advanced Query API to search for "games only" and sort by "position on Top Charts". You find several examples in the section "Example Queries".
As you might notice, that endpoint expects a POST request, so make sure you enclose your payload (e.g. JSON-formatted search parameters) in the body of the request message. If you use PHP this other post gives you a good example on how to do it: How do I send a POST request with PHP?
Hope this was helpful! If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.
(Disclaimer: I am the CEO and co-founder of 42matters.)
The best API for accessing Android and iTunes App Store data is https://www.appmonsta.com. They were recently acquired by MightySignal.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
Following Question is not for Negative voters, Infect I have to program an iOS app in Objective C, which works with MySQL Database on server side, since app requires to communicate with server(needs user to input few text boxes and to attach in Image).and on the otherside users can track a number to see results(uploaded by other users). hence I am restricted to use json coz json retrieves over all file and then extract required result from that file,
That's why I needs to use serverside MySQL and needs to run few queries(POST) to submit information provided by users and also needs some query to retrieve required number's row from MySQL Database.
Now the problem is that I am quite unknown from MySQL installation on serverside, and also unfamiliar that how to connect MySQL with my iOS app using Objective C.
Since there are lots of tutorials on the internet forums and as well as at youtube, but I am not able to make final selection that, which tutorial will be the best suitable for me to quick & Detailed learn these things, and Since last two days I am spending my lots of time but still unable to find any easy, quick & Complete tutorial for this purpose.
your quick help will be highly appreciated.
Thanks
In such kind of applications, their are Web API's / Web Services interface provided by using some server side scripting language coupled with a database, in your case the database is MySql.
A web service is a collection of open protocols and standards used for
exchanging data between applications or systems. Software applications
written in various programming languages and running on various
platforms can use web services to exchange data over computer networks
like the Internet in a manner similar to inter-process communication
on a single computer. This interoperability (e.g., between Java and
Python, or Windows and Linux applications) is due to the use of open
standards.
These web services provide API's in form of some URL's with specific parameters and on the behalf of those parameters it communicate with the database and return some data either in XML or in JSON. And on the behalf of that data the user's app can perform various tasks.
Web Service Reference
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
I recently delved into app development on Xcode, and decided to develop a social app. I was using Parse as my mbaaS for a while, but unfortunately they are closing down. I was wondering in your experience what is(are) the best alternatives to Parse. Im basically using looking for something
1) easy to use
2) Well documented
3) Lots of tutorials
4) Can handle lots of RPS and users.
The app I am developing is a social app, so if you have any specific recommendation for an app of that type, that would help tremendously. Also it is important to note that I have no backend development experience, so it would be a challenge to develop my own.
Thanks again
There are several Parse alternatives out there right now:
AWS Mobile Hub - this is a direct Parse replacement that recently came out by AWS. Although this is in Beta, AWS is a well respected platform that supports many huge companies like Netflix and Yelp
Firebase - (acquired by Google) Firebase offers a great solution for real time communication and data storage. It's perfect if what you are doing is mainly data & realtime (chat, game, collaboration, etc...) but it's not very flexible for other things (e.g. payment, SMS, push notifications etc...) firebase.com
RapidAPI - a backend platform that allows for saving data and integrating APIs. It is based on blocks so each basic action is represented by a block. You can combine blocks to create logic. It has a bit of a higher learning curve but it's probably more flexible
BackAnd - a platforms that allows you to create an AngularJS ready backend for your app. Its really good of you are working on AngularJS web apps and your data is stored on Amazon RDS.
Baasbox is a good alternative to Parse. A lot of features used in Parse are there (Push messaging etc), so migrating an app is relatively straightforward. They provide an API for Android, iOS and Javascript.
One of the main advantages it has over Parse is that it can be hosted yourself (Although there is a hosted option available, but it's not free).
http://www.baasbox.com
Out of all the available backends, we found this to be most similar to Parse.
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
I have a general architecture question. From where applications like Skype or Viber delivers user images?
For example, if I am a user that registers in the application and I set my profile image - then that image is uploaded to the server.
When I open my list of contacts (that is fetched from the server), how are images served? Are they served from some url all the time or they are downloaded and cached on the mobile device?
What do you think, which approach is better. And maybe there is a third approach that I am not aware of.
Thanks for clarifying.
Its common practice to cache that kind of content at least while the app is in memory. Whether to retain it between runs depends on the cost of fetching again and the probability of needing it.
Hope i'm understand your question. I see these ways:
You can use some third-party services to get user's picture by his email or some other information; for example: https://gravatar.com/.
It's similar with 1: You are linking your user with his profile in some social network, Facebook for example. Then you can get access to his avatar and contact list, which includes avatars of his friends.
You are uploading and saving pictures of users by you own.
All apps definitely doing in these ways. In any case, mobile app stored pictures in his cache or file system, it helps your app not to downloading a new copy of images each time. Usually, it's cache: they will not download resource if no change was made. Http protocol has special header ('modified-since' AFAIK) for it.
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
So I know this is a pretty simple question, but I've looked through all of my iOS textbook and can't seem to find out how people do this. I just want to store and edit an array on the internet. That is, let's say all of the data for my application is stored in an NSMutableArray. Ignoring the complications that occur with people editing the array at the same time, how would I allow multiple people to go into my app and then through that app access and edit the NSMutableArray for others to see?
There are a ton of options here, some of which were listed by #Zaph. The most common scenario to share data between a ton of random users is to setup your own server to run an API that you app will be able to communicate with. This is commonly referred to as the "Backend". The solutions here are vast, written in many different languages and sometimes even provided by third parties services. My advice is to pickup a simple, easy to learn server-side setup like Ruby-on-Rails, then deploy test app on Heroku as they provide free accounts to play with.
In addition to the options #coneybeare provided some others include DropBox, Parse and Azure.
Dropbox requires each user so setup an account.
Parse and Azure have rather easy APIs but you will be paying past the free tier.