I had developed 3 applications for my client. Now he wants to distribute it to other organizations (doing same business). Other firms will have minor data and image set changes, other functionalities are same. What is the best approach for distributing this 3 application with the other firms?
1) One solution I think is to upload this 3 application to each firms apple enterprise account.
Prons:
UI and functionality can be changed for each apps depends on business
changes.
Will have different server and APIs. So data security can be increased.
Cons:
Need to maintain different source codes.
As firms number increases applications also increases, which can be a form of spamming appStore
with similar applications.
2) Another solution is to upload this 3 application to one account and is distributed among other firms. Need to check any legal issue in doing this. By this server will maintain different database for different Companies and user registered with this company will link to the corresponding database. All other calculation and logic will be handled by the server. iOS application switches image set w.r.t company.
Can I do this by any other approach or which one is the best one. The main idea is to give a contract to another firm by creating a set of users having an extendable validity date and this is maintained by my client.
Thanks in advance and any thought on this is appreciable.
The best solution to this is Volume Purchase Program for Business
provided by Apple. It provides you with a functionality called Custom B2B apps for iOS. You can read the details in this document.
Related
I am working on an app that serves two different types of user. Both users have some common functionalities.
One group is the general public, who uses the app to navigate basic events or request for new events.
The second group is who can provide services to the general public (can be paid or unpaid). They primarily access the profiles created by general users. They can add details, e.g. notes about conversations with them.
Now we want to divide both the users because the app is getting quite large and at any time user can be part of one group only.
How can I create separate apps?
Using different targets for each group is it a better solution? I tried this but it is not helping us to reduce app size.
Creating separate project will make maintaining challenge because both uses have some common functionalities.
I built an in-house app for selling tickets and checking-in students to our High School dances. At the moment the app can scan a QR code with the student's information and add their name to either a "Sales" list or "Check In" list. Then the app can export these lists to a CSV file and we compile all the data.
App works perfectly as expected. NOW I want to be able to sync data between multiple devices so that every device will see an up to date Sales and Check in list. The check in list is most important because then our faculty chaperones can all see who has arrived to the dance in real time. I figured I would need to build a server to hold all the data as opposed to on the individual devices like I am doing now (CoreData). Can anyone please give me guidance or advice as to where to go from here? I am using Swift and developing for iOS 10.
I would just answer the general approach to tackle this problem since the implementations would largely be depending on many factors (what database technology is available, the platform of the server, etc.)
You are absolutely right, you need a server to hold the data. Technically speaking, it is a database that holding the data. Thus, you need a database running on your server (there are tons of selections here: Maria DB, SQL Server, Mongo DB, etc.).
Next, you need to build a web service on top of the database so that the iOS app can interact with the database (add/delete/update/read rows). Web service is a very common layer in full-stack application since you normally don't access the database directly.
Finally, you need to guard your web service with some sort of authentication. I.e. you don't want any random person out there to be able to access your web service without permission. There are many implementations out there to secure your web service and you should be able to google that easily.
Firebase might be the easiest solution. Its pretty simple to setup, and its pretty simple to set up data persistence when you go off line. I'm big on trying to stick with the built in Apple services, but Firebase is hard to beat for simple apps.
Take a look at CloudKit, or perhaps Firebase or Azure, as services that will provide a back end server for you, and give you a tested SDK to build against.
I'm new to iOS programming and am starting my first project. I'm wondering how clients manage the content (blogs, videos, etc) on their apps after you deliver the final product. Is their a content management system I should be implementing or do the developers usually handle that?
A developer would build it from scratch. An alternative to starting from the ground up would be to use CloudKit or some other NoSQL based web service to manage the content. Couchdb, Firebase, etc...
A client might add content in several ways. One could create a simple web form that allows a client to edit the content (empty form to add, a table with a link to edit or delete). If the client has a developer account you could add their Apple ID as a role to the CloudKit database with specific security rights to edit that database. Similar activities would apply to other platforms.
In essence, I'm building a private journaling app for iOS using Swift that will have a social feature. When creating a new entry, the user can choose to share the entry with specified friends from a friends list. The friend will receive a notification of the new entry, and it will be added to their own journal. The friend can later choose to accept or deny addition of the entry from their personal journal after review. Users won't be able to see each other's journals, they will only be able to share(add) entries to their friend's journals.
While I'd prefer to use iCloud, CloudKit won't allow me to share the entry records between users if I store them in a private database, and the information will be too sensitive to plop into the public database. CKRecordZones would be helpful, but they are only available for organizing a private database, so they will do me no good with sharing entries.
Can the privatized entry sharing I want be accomplished through Parse or perhaps another service I'm unaware of? Or will I have to build a custom backend to accomplish this?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!!
I think below links can solve your problem:
iOS 8 data sharing between users
How to share Core Data between multiple users?
ios share data between users
Read all 3 questions and right answers of them.
CloudKit would be the easiest when you are ok with limiting it to Apple devices only. If you wan tot make a quick start with that, then try out EVCloudKitDao
Until now the logical choice for this kind of apps was Parse. It's easy to implement and has a lot of features.
Amazon just released a new AWS Mobile Hub that looks very promising. It integrates with all AWS services, is very powerful and now also easy to use.
You could also use Microsoft Azure Mobile Service. It looks like it has similar features as AWS.
Of course there are more less known environments that also might work in your case but I think it would be wiser to stay with one of the above 4 well known choices.
Which of these you should pick is more or less a personal choice. They can all do what you want. If it's the best use for you depends on your use case.
I currently work at a school and have an idea to create an app that allows students to contact a grown up (for example, the principle) anonymously through an app. The app would quite simply consist of a contact form. I am trying to find out the best, and easiest way to achieve this without setting up servers with a separate API. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to achieve it? Is there any way to set up an e-mail form with a pre set recipient and a built in sender-account? Please guide me in the right direction.
You would need to implement an SMTP client. You can use open source code like skpsmtpmessage
It's likely that their example app could be your solution.
Your biggest problem will be the deployment. You definitely need to pay an $99/y developer account and add all the students device ID's to your account (with a maximum of 100 devices/y) or register all of them as beta tester (I don't know the limitations).
Probably this isn't doable so easily, as it seems you don't have iOS developing experience so far. Maybe you can find something on the app store that works with self hosted databases. But you definitely need to host some kind of webApp/API.
You may want to give Appygram a try to handle the back-end if you are able to set up the contact form itself. While it's a separate hosted API, at least you don't have to build/manage it.
Appygram is a free web service that would allow you to configure all the details such as which adults could be contacted, their point(s) of contact (i.e. email address), and it would process and send all the submissions for you. All your app needs to do is send a form post request.
A nice thing about having this information outside of the iOS app itself is that you can change the contact details on the fly without requiring an update to the iOS app itself. Whether you use Appygram (which, since I contribute to it, I am slightly biased toward!) or something similar, I would say that since this is for students, I would recommend a solution that would allow you to update your configuration without requiring app updates.
Finally, I'd second what Julian said. The challenge here could be with deployment. One possible alternative would be to make this a mobile-friendly web page accessible only via student login or on the school network (or both). Would probably be easier development-wise and wouldn't require installs nor the hurdles that Julian described with device registration, etc. And, Appygram would still work with this setup as well.
Good luck!