I was wondering if it was possible to play a continues sound in my Skype like application when a user is called an the other user has the app installed but the app is in the background in the moment.
It would be really awesome if it could could show an "accept / decline" on the lock screen. But that might not be possible is it?
I have looked around on the internet, but I could not find it. (I think I saw something related to this on a keynote once, but that might just be my memory hoping it exists.)
That is possible to show an "accept / decline" on lock screen or notification itself. The only thing that is not possible to do is to make input field for quick response (as it's done in Messages app)
There is nice guide to interactive notifications for iOS8.
To play sound i suggest you to use possibilities provided by UILocalNotification instead of implementing custom sound/vibration.
Also, if your app is in background, it must use push notifications, so for VoIP apps i suggest you to take a look into PuskKit framework and special type of pushes - VoIP pushes
Related
A lot of todo-list apps such as Wunderlist offer some kind of reminder feature which usually just fires off a notification.
But I have never encountered an app that offer a similar notification view as the built in preinstalled alarm clock. You know, that locks the phone and offers a snooze option.
This makes me wonder if the alarm clock functionality that is built into the preinstalled iOs app from Apple including setting time or add a snooze button etc is only available for that particular app?
Since I'm a designer without any coding skills I only want to know if it possible or not.
Unfortunately this is unavailable for developers. You can check all of alarm clock apps in AppStore, all of them are using the standard local notifications. Which will fire once and that's all. You can of course set your custom sound and change couple of options, but it will never work like one build in Clock app inside iPhone.
You can read more about local notifications in Apple documentation: https://developer.apple.com/reference/usernotifications/unnotificationrequest
I figured Alarmy is constantly playing (when there is an alarm set up) a silent sound in the background. Like Spotify, but silent. This keeps the app active all the time. I came to this conclusion by logging the result AVAudioSession.sharedInstance().isOtherAudioPlaying (Swift 4) in my own application. Whenever Alarmy is terminated it returns false, whenever Alarmy is running in the background it returns true. Same thing happens for the app linked by Ernesto Elsäßer.
I used the same technique and I also used this pod to trigger a function when the time comes and start the real music.
I did this for testing and am not going to make an app out of it because playing silent sounds in the background is against Apple's rules. I don't know how Alarmy (or other apps that use this same method) got away with it.
Some related questions:
How do you constantly run in background?
App “Alarmy” is able to play iTunes song from background state… How?
Wake up application in background using AudioSession like Alarmy iOS app
Also you can check this article out.
This app seems to do exactly this, but I have no clue how ...
I tested it, and it managed to start playing music on a locked device at an arbitrarily chosen time, and for way longer than the 30s timeframe allowed for notification sounds. Further, the music is streamed from an online radio station, meaning they found a way to ...
wake up the app from a scheduled notification without user interaction
create a socket connection to a radio station in the background
start playing sound in the background for an indefinite amount of time
I also tried out the alarm in Airplane Mode, and it still played a locally stored backup song, so it probably doesn't abuse the VoiP background mode or push notifications, but really is triggered by a local notification ...
So although I can't tell how, it looks like there is an App Store Review-proof way to create a real alarm app.
(I am not affiliated with the developers of this app, just did some research on what's possible.)
I created an app that will send text messages through an API similar to Twilio, and I have an NSTimer that fires a function every set amount of time. The problem is that if you press the home button, it will totally stop the timing, which defeats the purpose.
I have read that it is possible to have your phone play a mute sound until closed to make sure it still runs in the background, but I can't find a resource on how to do this. Here is an example: To run NSTimer in background
If anyone has any information on how to do this, I'm sure it is very simple, and I very much appreciate the help.
Thank you.
If you set up your app as a background sound playing app then yes, it is technically possible to play a "silent sound" in order to keep it active in the background, but your app will be rejected by Apple if you do this.
Apple expressly forbids what you are trying to do.
You should look at using scheduled local notifications. Those will alert the user, who can bring your app to the foreground and let it perform the desired task.
I have a volume control app in the iOS store, but one problem that my users have frequently is that the device kicks it for memory control. Is there any way to either force it to stay active (by permission) or to at least alert the user when its no longer active or in danger?
All the answers are under Background Execution in the iOS Developer Library.
Of course, here's the philosophy:
Always try to avoid doing any background work unless doing so improves
the overall user experience.
See Table 3-1 for the types of background execution. There's a category for audio but it requires audio to be played from the app. It does not sound like your app fits in here. So you'll want to look at notifying the user.
You could send a notification to the user when the app falls to background with applicationDidEnterBackground(), or just before it quits with applicationWillTerminate(), supposedly time-permitting.
Running in the background is permitted. I have an app that does it and while the rules have changed and adapting to it has been gut wrenching at times, it is pretty straightforward. In your case, I would think that you could setup to be notified and then just disappear, no? waking from a notification is part of the state changing protocol and you should be able to do that.
As a point of comparison, in Android, background operations like yours would be implemented as services and would have no fear of being terminated. The strangest thing about the way ios chooses to allow background activity is that you are applying for status one time. In Android, I was able to indicate that a single activity should be kept alive when the app is backgrounded, all others could be terminated. There is no way to do that in ios.
I take it my disappear and wait for notifications is probably not going to work for you because there is no way to be notified of volume changes. You must be polling? In which case, you probably are going to have to ask to be kept alive. Would be nice if you could just piggyback on other services, e.g. keep me alive while music is playing.
To answer your other question, yes you will get notified if/when you really are going to get termed, so you could send a notification at that point.
I'm trying to create a little reminder-app for my special needs ;-)
Is there a way to tell iOS to wake my app up from the background at a specific time/in regular intervals?
The app would then decide to turn on the screen or play a sound, if required.
So far I can't figure out how to do this. All I can find on iOS 7 multitasking is about playing music, downloading data etc. Nothing time based...
As far as I know, it is not possible.
The closest you can get to that is by sending either a local or a push notification.
Take a look at local notifications: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/Introduction.html
The main class is UILocalNotification, documented at https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iphone/Reference/UILocalNotification_Class/Reference/Reference.html
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.