I'm about to start expanding my secondhand app, where people can put their used university books for sale.
Right now the app is only available in one country, but in the near future other scandinavian countries will follow.
As an example I want to expand to Sweden, the user should only be able to see/buy/sell books that are for sale in that country.
I have come up with 2 solutions, but none of them are quite good:
Location decides country.
User selects the country from a list.
I would like to hear your thoughts on this, since lots of apps do this - but I can't figure out how.
Why not a combination of both? Try the location services first, if for whatever reason they have location services turned off or don't allow it, have them select their country. The country selection should be one of the first prompts they are given when they open the app (if location services aren't on). Otherwise, before they are allowed to post any books for sale. In other words they shouldn't be allowed to put a book up for sales without the app knowing which country they are in.
Are you using swift (what version) or objective-c?
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/CoreLocation/Reference/CLLocationManager_Class/
You'll need a list of countries: How do I get a list of countries in Swift ios?
If you are willing to pay some. You could look at a ip based Solution like the www.maxmind.com api. It Gives country info and more. And we bought 50.000 queries for 50 dollars. And as we check once per user, we did not even finÃsh our bought queries!
I believe your application should do a guesswork and provide easy-to-use alternative for the case when the guess was incorrect. Get the country by location or IP. When the user installs the app, show the selected country and make sure your user can easily change it both in the installer and in the app itself (if, for instance, one student moves from a country to the other).
Related
At the moment I have an app on the App Store, which is only available in the U.K., this is because in the U.K., U.S. and the E.U. use different measurements (imperial and metric).
So what I want to know, how would I tell what country a user is from, and in turn know which conversion to use?
Maybe an if statement for Locale? If that's even possible, or an option where the user selects what country they are from (and then save it so they don't have to input every time they go on the app?)
Many thanks.
The Apple App Store has some fairly strict requirements on what content an app can display and still meet the age ratings. I'd like to add a feature that can display content created by any 3rd party which means that, though "adult content" is not appropriate, it's not possible to guarantee that some spammer or vulgar person doesn't post inappropriate things.
I'm considering blocking access to that particular feature of the program for younger users.
How can an iOS app determine the age "category" of its user in order to choose what features to provide?
Other suggestions on how to deal with the issue of un-vetted 3rd party content is also welcome.
Ok so basically you want to know if there is a way to detect the users age and thus display certain features as is appropriate.
Well two ideas come to mind:
IDEA 1
You could try using the built in contacts API to see which contact the user has set themself as. If they have one, then check if it has a birth date. And thus figure out their age.
IDEA 2
Ask the user to enter their birth date in when they launch the app for the very first time. Then figure out the age and save it in a NSUserDefault. You can then use that value throughout the app to determine what features and posts to show the user.
I have a site for a hobby im working on that has restaurant reviews on it. I want users to be able to add new restaurants in as well as edit the info on other restaurants which they may or may have not added to the site. I am not sure what the best way to approach this is. I have a few options I have thought of, but I'm not sure.
Only allow restaurants that are on say google places
main concern with this approach is if a restaurant a user wants to go to isn't listed on google places then what
Allow users to manually add in restaurants and check google places and fill in pertinent info like address phone if not on google places then let user add all info in manually... if is or is'nt on google places still have to manually accept restaurant to the site
the main downside of this is I may have to spend tons of time making sure a restaurant is real or isn't real
Anyone have any ideas?
also i am running rails should i just use a versioning gem to achieve the request an update so that way i can moderate updates or new restaurants...
I am no Ruby guy, so I will not comment on that part. But depending on the size of your user base I would solve it by user moderation or do it manually. If you haven't got that many users moderating the new entries should be feasible and if you got many users it should be possible to accept any new entry and then allow users to flag bad entries like it is done here on SO or on foursquare or Facebook Places.
Of course you could choose to accept anything available on Google Places, but only allowing entries that can be found there would make it annoying for users to enter new info which would discourage them from doing so.
I have a client who has a requirement that they can't sell particular products 'outside the United States'.
They'd prefer that users can see the site, but when they try to checkout present a message indicating they are outside the United States.
Their site is built in Rails 2.3.8.
Check out the GeoIP gem (make sure to read the instructions, you need to download the GeoLiteCity or GeoLiteCountry database in order for it to work). It uses MaxMind's GeoIP database and can give you the country (or city, in the case of the city database) of an IP address, with some accuracy. There is a commercial database with better accuracy available, which I would recommend for your use case.
However, be advised that this is by no means a definitive solution. Some customers will be turned away wrongfully, and some will be able to order even though they should not. Things like satellite connections, proxy servers and VPN services make IP location impossible, and no database is 100% complete or correct.
What you're looking for is some kind of rough geolocation. One way to get this is to query a DNS zone designed specifically for this; one such zone is described at http://countries.nerd.dk.
I am from Ukraine. And when a particular US shop doesn't want to sell products overseas it usually specifies in the policy/faq/etc that only US bank issued payment cards are accepted.
That seems for me the best solution to solve: "can't sell particular products 'outside the United States'. "
As there are package/mail/freight forwarding companies which can be used by a potential client of that customer though residing outside US but whom the customer won't have to ship directly. That customer would still benefit from those sales but are freed from dialing with burden associated with overseas shipping.
And when you will solve it with geolocation, that customer would still be able making additional money, when people would still be using the site through different kind of proxies, if that customer will be worth it. :)
You can use their data that you pull into your database to check the user's IP address. http://www.ipligence.com/geolocation/ (you still have to worry about proxying)
I would also check where your shipping it to (checking addresses like suggested above), also check the card address with the card backer like VISA, etc..
And suggested above, your money processing agent shouldn't allow any transactions from outside the U.S. on particular items (if possible)
But I did read your statement SOME products may not be allowed to be sold outside the U.S. So you'll need a way to mark those products in your system and then let the user know they are unable to purchase those items, but continue on with others in the cart.
You could use a Rack Middleware, but it will require that you fork it on Github first.
https://github.com/roja/rack-geo
At the moment this project gives you City and Organisation names based on the IP address of the computer making the request - you need Country Code too.
You could add it to the code relatively easily here: https://github.com/roja/rack-geo/blob/master/lib/rack/geo.rb
You could then set a Rack environment variable to indicate if the request is from the USA, in the call method:
Rack::Request.new(env)["born"] = "...in the USA"
Add it to your config file:
config.middleware.use Rack::Geo
And then in your controller you can test if the request has this environment variable set appropriately and redirect to a 'sorry you must be from the USA' page:
if params['born'] == "...in the USA"
redirect_to "/not_from_round_here"
end
Bear in mind that IP address sniffing is fallible. I often take trains in the UK and end up with Google in German.
A geoip alternative is can be found here: http://humbuckercode.co.uk/licks/gems/geoip/
Uses the maxmind libraries, easy to set up, no schema updates needed, fast
I wish to track a user's country from where my website is accesed .
ex; if a customer from a particular is accessing say america how to trace that the user is actually from america.
Is there any way
What you are talking about is called GeoIP and there are many ways to do it. Normally this is done using a third party that has a mapping of IP addresses to physical locations.
This is of course not 100% accurate, as people may be using VPNs, TOR or simply spoofing addresses.
It's not possible in all cases, but most IP addresses can be mapped to a location (even down to the city). There are quite a large number of such geomapping services.
Use MaxMind service.
http://www.maxmind.com/app/javascript_city
They got free and paid versions.
You can determine the country of the IP address of last proxy that a user is using. This is often their country, but not always.
Users can set out to obscure it e.g. by using TOR or another proxy service.
Or their ISPs might be passing them through NAT or through other countries.
And what do you do with the information? Offer them the site in their presumed-native language? Or customise your contact details appropriately?
So you have to think carefully about how you use this information. It is a good idea to present a page in the native language that you think the user is surfing from, but you must make it easy and obvious for the user to change their country. Not all surfers in any given country actually speak the language, and not all people can call toll-free numbers, and not all people in one country are wanting support that's specific to their country, they may be seeking support for when they are elsewhere or for a friend etc.