I am not certain what OS made this capability available but I noticed that on my iPhone 5 (which is running the beta iOS8), when the phone is locked a "W" icon was appearing at the bottom-left. It shows "Slide to Unlock", the camera icon on the right, the "bar" that lets me access the control center in the middle - and a "W" on the left. Sliding this "W" up launches the Walgreen's iPhone app. I do not think this is a normal UINotification, nothing in Passbook, and when I go into the Notification Center settings, turning all notifications off for the Walgreen app, the icon still shows.
Is this a notification? Is this a plist parameter? Bug?
Thanks.
This is a new ios 8 feature that displays an app (purchased or not) that is relevant to your location. You must have been near a Walgreens at the time. As far as I know, there is no way to choose that app or submit an app for that. Apple decides what displays there.
You can turn this off by going to settings > General > Handoff and Suggested Apps. Then turn off Installed Apps. According to the description, these Apps are suggested based on usage and location.
Related
I was wondering if you can make the home screen visible through an app.
For example, let's take an example from the Apple Calculator. On macOS, the top is blurred and you can see everything through it.
I know iOS is a whole different OS and works through views and not tabs, but still: is it possible to e.g. blur the top of the iOS calculator and see the home screen through it?
Thanks, Ben
Unfortunately this is not possible, as this could be a serious breach of privacy for iPhone users.
If you could make the home screen visible through an app, a developer could technically save pictures of users' homescreens and store them in a remote database, which could give them access to private information. As a result, Apple doesn't allow you to do this.
Is the iPhone "device Home button" (circle button that is part of the hardware at bottom center) the standard way that users exit an iPhone app?
I don't have an actual iPhone device yet (looking for the iPhone6 to come down in price a bit), am just working with Xcode simulators. When I run my iPhone Swift apps, they are always in full screen mode.
On Android, there are a few navigation buttons built into the OS that appear at the bottom of the screen - Back, Home, Open Apps. And in that OS you can give a directive to exit full screen to reveal those OS buttons.. which then allows the user to easily exit the app if they'd like to.
In looking at the iPhone apps on the simulator, I notice they don't have this kind of UX.
What are the best practices around iPhone users
A. Sending an app to the background ?
B. Quitting/Closing an app ?
To send an app to the background, hitting the home button is sufficient.
To quit an app, tapping the home button twice shows you all the open apps; you can then swipe an app to "kill" (terminate) it.
However, here is a recent post by the excellent John Gruber explaining why killing an app should only be a last resort: https://daringfireball.net/2017/07/you_should_not_force_quit_apps
Note: on the iPhone Simulator, the command-shift-H key combo is equivalent to hitting the home button.
To send an app to the background:
Press the Home button.
To "quit" or "close" an app:
Press the Home button.
That's all the UX expected of an iOS app... and none if it is actually provided by your app. iOS manages it for you; you just have to deal with your app's lifecycle methods to respond to the user leaving and re-entering your app.
iOS doesn't expect users to know or care about the difference between "background" and "closed/quit" in most cases. You enter an app, you leave an app, that's it.
And the way iOS works under the hood, there is no difference in most cases — when you leave an app, it's not "running in the background", it's "frozen" or "suspended": that is, in memory but not running. That way the OS can get it usable again near-instantly if the user comes back, or instantly reclaim that memory if another process needs it.
The user can also invoke the multitasking UI (double click home button, or in iOS 11 on iPad swipe up from bottom edge) and swipe an app away, but this is equivalent to the "kill" or "force quit" actions seen in other operating systems — it's primarily for situations where an app is misbehaving. This isn't part of your app's UX either; it's also provided by iOS.
As noted in the Daring Fireball post linked from #TimKokesh's answer, there are some circumstances where an app "in the background" isn't "frozen" but has some limited ability to run, the Settings app has UI to help the user keep tabs on what are using (and abusing) that ability, and those are some of the only cases where it's reasonable for a user to "force quit" apps.
If you want to have a real iPhone look-alike simulator on your development environment, yes it's available with New Xcode-9/Beta version. It shows real hardware buttons(volume, lock, home buttons) which you can press and feel like a real device. If you are interested you can download it from here
On other Xcode environments, you can go to home screen by pressing the keys: Cmd + Shift + H
As you likely know, Game Center new player invites are done through Messages now in iOS 10. When using the custom invite image, GKMessageImage.png, the GK view controller generated message is supposed to also insert a tiny app icon in the upper left corner. Yet in my problematic case, it is the null criss-crossy icon when using my iPhone 6S to compose the invite message, even though I have provided all seemingly relevant app icons to XCode (every size asked for in Image.xcassets/AppIcon for iOS 9 and 10, the only versions my app works on). Oddly, it works properly when I compose the message from an iPad. Has anyone seen or solved this? Is there some other place, filename, and/or size that would be needed to provide this app icon?
How to show iPhone app icon on lock screen same as camera on bottom left.
Is there any framework required to implement or just go to settings page in iPhone.
How to do it exactly please described step wise.
Thanks in Advance
You might have seen in certain circumstances some app icons are showing up in the bottom left corner of lock screen. That is an iOS 9 feature. that may be because of following reason.
You're near a business or iBeacon that is broadcasting its location and you have a corresponding app installed, such as being near a Starbucks store; drag the icon to the top of the screen to launch that app.
You're able to use Handoff to take over from an app on another device. For example, if you're composing an email message on your iPhone and switch to your iPad, drag the Mail icon that appears on the iPad up to load the message you were working on in the Mail app.
When you insert a headphone jack into the device's headphone port, or connect to a Bluetooth stereo, iOS 9 guesses you want to listen to something and displays the icon of the last audio app you used when connecting headphones or pairing to that particular speaker. Drag the icon up to open that app.
Reference : http://www.imore.com/how-use-home-screen-and-lock-screen-your-iphone-6s
Apart from these, there can be more reasons, like if you are using an application at a particular location/time for few times/days, then iOS will suggest the app once you reach that location or at particular time of every day.
you can't do this kind of stuff from code or from your application. It is apple's restriction. and you can't change it or replace with another app. it is by default camera app.
iOS Suggested App feature will show app icon on left bottom corner in iPhone lock screen.
Which delegate method will be called (on UIApplication or I don't know)
when clicking on the bottom left app icon ?
The Suggested Apps feature is a list of apps that are popular/relevant to specific locations, managed entirely by Apple.One can request to be added to that list for a specific app.
You can read more about it in this answer to a similar question, where an Apple Tech Support explains it: https://stackoverflow.com/a/26676020/2242359
Sliding up the icon from there will either open the AppStore page of the app or simply launch the app.
The other way to get you app icon to the corner of the lock screen is by using iBeacon - in that way the app must already be installed on the users device and the icon will appear when getting close to the iBeacon device.