I'm writing an iOS app that uses data collected from websites. A large amount of data is retrieved when parsing the content so it needs to come from a backend server where data can be collected and added to the database once rather than parsed on the device.
I've looked at BaaS frameworks like Parse and am considering using this, but I'd like to know if it is possible to add records to CloudKit externally from say a Linux server? I've looked everywhere and can't find anything other than adding records programmatically (from the app) or via the dashboard.
You could create an OSX app (no other platforms are supported yet) that is communicating to the same CloudKit container. But then that app also needs to be signed and submitted to the app store. You don't have to make it public, you just need to submit it.
Related
I've frequently heard that the main issue we need Firebase security rules is because an application contains all the configurations needed to connect to the database and thus users could do something like db.delete('*'), read/write whatever they want, etc. etc.
I can see how this is possible on a web app, as you could check out the requests being sent over the network and thus get the endpoint needed to connect to the database, but, on an iOS app, how would this be possible?
For instance, say I created some chat app with Firebase and released it to the App Store. When a user downloads it, how would he/she gain access to my database through an API other than the buttons etc I provide with them with? Is there something equivalent to the "Network" section in google chrome that shows all outgoing requests, and, from, this they could send a malicious request to my database? Would this require installing 3rd party software onto their device to see all outgoing/incoming requests and they could get the required endpoint/database connection info from there?
Thanks.
When a user downloads it, how would he/she gain access to my database through an API other than the buttons etc I provide with them with?
It's not hard to reverse engineer the contents of the IPA file to get both the configuration you provided, and also see what the code is that queries the database. The IPA file can be obtained pretty easily - there is not much protecting that, given the user effectively has full control over the device (e.g. jailbreak). Given that information, it's possible to simply invoke the public Firestore REST API to not just duplicate all the operations in the app, and but invent operations of their own.
What is the best way, to share a database between different devices, that are not just the user’s ones, but for example could be his friend’s phone. That means that iCloud is not an option.
Example:
All of my data is app-user specific, so basically:
user logs into my app, do some work
then he can log in with the same acc on his friend phone and data should be the same
Is there an any way to upload the whole user specific database to some online storage provider (like firebase,… ) and then download it on another device and initialise core data stack, when the same user logs in on a different device?
Or is it the only way to sync data with the server and than preload the database?
You could simply upload the whole database file(s) and then download it on another device. The problem though is portability. You need to ensure that both devices support the same version of the database so they are compatible. To port the same thing to another platform is again a different story but doable when not using core data.
Then there is a problem of conflicts. Imagine you forget to log out from the second device and you open it after a week and the database is accidentally synced back to the server. This will make you lose all the data you created on your "main" device.
So in general it is possible to sync the whole thing but you will have loads of issues. You should create a server that supports all entities and works through ids (so you know the object was modified and not created) and date modified to be able to resolve conflicts.
Syncing data between multiple devices is the biggest reason to use something like Firebase. That's one of its primary purposes. You would use Firebase for data storage instead of Core Data, and it would automatically handle syncing between devices. You don't write code to upload or download anything, you just read and write Firebase data and it handles the syncing. It supports user accounts, so if a user logs on on a different device, their data automatically syncs to that device. There are numerous other options besides Firebase, of course.
CloudKit also syncs between different devices, but it's linked to the current iCloud account on the phone. Since you want in-app login, it's not so good.
I build apps that bundle up JSON data. I want to switch to Firebase as my backend, but I need to ensure I can access the data even if firebase is offline. There's no guarantee that the user will have an internet connection at the time they launch the app. The data consists of a fairly large JSON blob.
I heard that firebase does cache data on iOS for offline access, and that's great. I just need to know how to bundle the data for that first time the app is ran, so the user can use the app prior to getting to a network connection.
As it sounds like you discovered, the Firebase Obj-C client does have beta support for offline access / disk persistence. Details can be found here.
But that doesn't address your desire to "seed" the app with initial data so that it has data available before the app has ever been able to connect to Firebase. Unfortunately, there's no direct support for that.
One hacky solution you could attempt with Firebase is to just do a setValue with the data in question, in order to seed the cache. This should work but will eventually try to write that data to Firebase, when the app gets connected, so you'd probably want to have security rules to prevent the user from actually modifying that data. As I said, it'd be a hacky solution.
For now it might be best to just handle this with special logic in your app that pulls data from some other data source (hardcoded values or an embedded file or whatever) until the first time you get data from Firebase.
Sorry there's no direct support for this at the moment. We'll take a look to see if we could support this more directly in the future.
How can I have the customer of an IOS app select and change selection data for use with an app?
I have an app that is designed to operate away from wifi. As such, it needs to carry its data around with it. This makes the data requirements rather large.
A base package is 25MB of data. However, it is likely people who use this app would want as much as 1GB of data.
Is it possible to do selective data downloads and updates from the app store?
How else could this be done
How can I have the customer of an iOS app select and change selection of data for use with an app?
Hard to say. It's not clear what you're talking about. Downloading data through an app is a well researched topic. You shouldn't have any trouble finding examples for downloading data to an app, here or elsewhere.
Is it possible to do selective data downloads and updates from the app store? How else could this be done?
Again, its not 100% clear what you mean. I don't think you can use the app store to provide new data to users who downloaded your app, unless you're talking about a full app update that comes bundled with your new data set.
I worked on a project once that had to work offline, but also work with a very large data set as well as some mapping components. We required users to first download our app, then after authenticating, the app would automatically download a cache of data while connected to a WiFi hotspot. When the user was out of WiFi range the app would operate off the data set they downloaded and would operate normally. When they came back into range it would ping the server to find out if their data was stale. If it was stale it would download new data. The WiFi connection requirement ensured that they would have an optimal experience fetching the latest data.
My thought is to create a menu in your app that lets the user select which "packages" of data they want to save to their device and run those downloads in the background when the user has an internet connection.
I know there are quite a few threads on this, but it seems none of them would satisfy what I am trying to look for. Here's my constraints:
not a hack that uses private API/framework or undocumented
directory access that would run the risk of app being rejected
because of that
being able to share data across different
vendors / app developers
data can persist outside the lifecycle
of the app (even after app is deleted)
UPDATED: I was in general trying to stay away from using a 3rd party cloud-based service to achieve the goal as this would introduce additional external dependency. But if I have to, I was hoping it could satisfy this one constraint
being able to tell which iOS device it is communicating with. It shouldn't have to uniquely identify the device (which will go into that evil UDID discussion route as we all experienced ). But as long as it can differentiate among different iOS devices it should be fine.
I kind of need this too. I use Parse.com as the backend of all my apps — their free tier should satisfy your development needs.
Parse has APIs available for iOS, Android, Windows 8, OS X, JavaScript and .NET, with all your data available on the cloud on any platform (contrary to Core Data and iCloud). They also offer "Cloud Code," which is code you can execute remotely, to process information remotely and get the data back to your app.
You should definitely check Parse.com out for cloud storage for your app. In my experience, it really gets the job done.
For Data Persistence, I think you might want to take a look at FMDB (although if you decide to persist data locally, it will get deleted with your app, but it might help you, anyways). Core Data is an overkill in many cases.
Edit: Parse.com has an "Installation" class, in which all the devices that have your app installed get listed (wether they're running iOS or Android), uniquely, without you having to type any code.
Maybe this blog post by TextExpander authors will help:
Smile has responded to this by discussing the issue with Apple
engineers at WWDC, filing a bug (#14168862), and checking up on the
status of that bug. We also developed a workaround by storing the
TextExpander data in a new place. Reminders requires user consent to
store and retrieve data. Completed reminders are not normally shown in
its interface. Long-past reminders appear at the bottom of the
completed reminders.
TextExpander touch 2.1 (and later) supports storing shared snippet
data in a long-past, completed reminder. We produced an updated SDK
and kept our developers posted on its progress. Our final SDK was
ready within a few hours of the end of Apple's official iOS 7
announcement.
UPDATE (22.11.2013)
This might not be the best way to do that, because TextExpander's team recently had problems with the App Review Team.
Edit: this only works for apps with the same vendor.
You can save a password to the device's keychain, then access that password from any app.
Using the SSKeychain library...
NSString *service = #"com.yourcompany.yourservice";
// read
NSString *password = [SSKeychain passwordForService:service account:#"user"];
// write
[SSKeychain setPassword:password forService:service account:#"user"];
The password string doesn't have a length limit, so encode all your data as a string and save it there. The keychain entry will persist after the user deletes the app.
One of the ways to do this is using THRIFT. This is a data communication protocol that would need a back end server (private) and THRIFT can be compiled into many languages / platforms. There is a meta language to describe the data and then can be thrift compiled into many languages. Write the data definition once and can be used on many platforms.
More information at.
http://thrift.apache.org/
for me (I have 2 apps and a widged) the best solution is using SSKeyChain and do not forget to add Capabilities for your apps like here
or if you don't wanna to use 3rd party library you can use NSUserDefaults and set the group identifier like here but again do not forget to add the group identifier in Capabilities in AppGroups section for all your apps that have share data.