How to merge two ios apps into one - ios

Question

I have two ios app one variant of the app is for the teachers and second version is for the students.Student version is live from the last two year on the app store.This version is non-ARC project .Now developed the teacher variant of the app .this version is using the storyboard and have the ARC.
My problem is that in the student version application is tabbar based and tabbar is declared in the app delegate .where as in the teacher version the application is based on heavily customised uinavigation controller like the side slide in menu ;which is declared in app delegate too.Now my problem is how can i combine these two project into one iPhone app.
Both teacher and students can be identify based upon the login.

Answer 1

I would try to re-work the student version into a storyboard (a separate one from the teachers version) and update it to ARC. Then, base on the login results (student or teacher), load the appropriate storyboard. So after you have the results of the login, you could do something like this:
UIStoryboard *storyBoard;
if (isStudent) {
storyBoard = [UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:#"MainStoryboard_student" bundle:nil];
}
else {
NSLog(#"teacher!");
storyBoard = [UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:#"MainStoryboard_teacher" bundle:nil];
}
UIViewController *initViewController = [storyBoard instantiateInitialViewController];
[self.window setRootViewController:initViewController];
In order to make sure your app will replace the one in the store, make sure you keep the same bundle ID for the new combined app as you had for the student version currently in the store.
If you do not want to convert the student version files to ARC, you can convert the project to ARC, but flag the student classes that have not been converted to arc with the -fno-objc-arc flag
Basically, click on the project file, select your target, select the Build Phases tab, and for each of the old project files that do not use ARC, add -fno-objc-arc in the Compiler Flags field in the Compile Sources section.

Answer 2

If both teachers and students can be identified at the login stage, to solve this problem you most likely would need create a unified login page (root view controller) in your AppDelegate. Then after the user logins you determine what part of app would be more appropriate and show the next view controller embedded in UINavigationController or UITabBarController.

Answer 3

you can can make student project compatible to ARC by adding compiler flag -fno-objc-arc to all class files of student project.
remove auto loading of storyboard from the project settings, in AppDelegate define the logic for loading the rootview.
if (isStudent) {
UIViewController *rootViewController = [[UIViewController alloc] init];//whatever you appdelegate code for student is
[self.window setRootViewController:rootViewController];
}
else {
NSLog(#"teacher!");
UIStoryboard *storyBoard;
storyBoard = [UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:#"MainStoryboard_teacher" bundle:nil];
UIViewController *initViewController = [storyBoard instantiateInitialViewController];
[self.window setRootViewController:initViewController];
}