I need to keep the app to send a simple GET request ("ping") to the server every minute just for it to know that user is still online. I have no problem with it while the app is active and 10 minutes after it went background using "beginBackgroundTaskWithExpirationHandler".
But how can I keep request repeated all the time unless user terminates app manually?
That's not really how it works -- it's not a Windows or a Mac app that runs continually in the background.
What you probably want to do is use the background fetch process, whereby iOS will periodically run a particular method allowing you to do network operations while your app is in the background (or not running at all).
What this won't allow you to do is ping your server exactly once every minute. But actually that's a good thing. Consuming a users battery and data allowance like that is not very user-friendly.
Related
I have been investigating iOS background fetch for our enterprise applications. According to articles like this, there are limitations like having 30 seconds to download before the app is terminated and the may be (unconfirmed) a penalty where after 3 timeouts, an app gets banned from background sync. Also if the user kills the app, fetches stop happening -noted here.
The goal is to be able to retrieve data from our servers periodically when app is suspended/not running but sometimes the transfers can take minutes due to long running SQL. I don't want to implement sending periodic notifications to all users.
Before I go down the path of developing for the iOS background sync, I needed to do some due diligence and research alternatives to iOS's background sync and didn't find anything.
Has anyone seen or developed an alternative to iOS's background sync or dealt with this issue for their enterprise apps?
As an enterprise app there's nothing extra you can do except that you can use whatever background modes you want (audio, location, voip etc,) without needing to have a legitimate reason to do so.
Where this might assist is:
you could make use of a significant location change (as opposed to a regular location change) notification to run your app in the background. The problem with this is it of course depends on the user of your app to move around. However, assuming everybody in your workforce commutes to/from work with their iPhone then you would have two opportunities each day for the app to run in the background. A app run due to a location change can be made to execute in the background for more than 30 seconds.
voip pushes: Unlike a regular push notification, a voip push will launch the app even if the user has force terminated it. To make use of this functionality is only a tiny bit more effort than using regular push, you don't have to do anything regarding making or receiving an actual voip call, you just need the voip capability and voip certificates instead of normal push certificates.
The comment in that link is not correct regarding force quitting and background fetch - a user force quitting an app does not make it ineligible to run for a background fetch, I have force quit my own app that uses background fetch but it will still be started by the OS, however what will happen is that the frequency when the app is run will decrease lots, and if the user never runs the app again then the OS will stop launching it.
A user force quitting an app will prevent other things from happening, such as it running in the background in response to a silent push notification for example (unless its a voip push).
Also the 30 seconds in not related to download times, NSURLConnection would stop after 30 seconds, NSURLSession is designed to continue to download on your app's behalf. But if you are downloading and then applying lengthy SQL processing it would be an issue. But minutes of processing time seems excessive, are you sure its all optimized?
The goal is to be able to retrieve data from our servers periodically when app is suspended/not running
The only reliable way to achieve such a behaviour is implementing a User-facing Remote (Push) Notifications framework on backend & apps.
You can append 4kB (or 5 for VOIP) worth of data in the push JSON payload, eliminating need for a network fetch request if implemented in a handshake mechanism.
You can evaluate usage on Silent Remote Notifications to augment content updation & fetch small amounts of content opportunistically, though it has the same as Background App Refresh.
You can definitely improve the API that can take minutes due to long running SQL
And remember you need to have the app updated only when the user actually fires it up. Evaluate implementing a catchy & smooth fetching content screen that transitions into the actual screens once all data is fetched.
I am not sure how to best implement keeping our server informed that our iPhone application is currently running (even when in the background). There are a few different options but there is some concern as to what is allowed by the Apple approval process as well as what is the most reliable. The application does have the ability to play music in the background, if that factors into what is approved by Apple.
The first option, is to continually send some sort of heartbeat to the server at a set interval through a simple GET/POST; however, the concern is whether or not this is allowed as a background task. In a very roundabout way it can be argued that it is necessary for the playback but I'm not so sure whether or not that is acceptable. If the server does not hear from them in a set amount of time it will assume the app is no longer running.
The second option involves using a presence channel socket connection and have the server just handle when users enter and leave that channel. With this option the main concern is how reliable is a socket connection like this while an app is in the background. Similarly, whether or not this is allowed by Apple. In this case when the app dies, connection closes and server knows app is not running.
Third option can be used in tandem with either of the other options but to use some sort of APNS push to query the phone as to whether or not it has died and have it respond with some data to let us know; however, this seems somewhat counterintuitive as the push itself wakes the app up.
Any other suggestions or input are also welcome.
Not sure if this should be a comment or answer, but let me put my 2 cents here.
Firstly, Can you please elaborate your needs further, because in case you are playing an Audio in background with AVPlayer/AVPlayerItem you would hand over your content URL to iOS and it will make the calls as and when necessary to keep the playback running, you dont need to know about apps' state.
Let me assume, for whatever reasons you want to achieve what the question asks:
There are 3 states your app can be in when it is "Not Running"
i. Suspended State: your app is not killed but its not receiving any CPU time to execute your code.
ii. Killed by OS: Your app can be terminated by iOS to free up the memory or any other resources.
iii. Force Killed by User: If user swipes up your app from app switcher it gets force killed.
Now when your app is Not Running, you CAN NOT query it, but you can move it to Running State. You can achieve this transition by using following methods (Not exhaustive list, but mentions common ways)
i. Background Fetch : You can configure your app to be invoked periodically, so that it can synchronise with the server and updates its state.
ii. Push Notifications (APNS) : You can ping the app from server so that iOS invokes it for some short period of time (few seconds) to update its state.
iii. VOIP Pushes: If your App is VOIP app you can use PushKit to send Silent Pushes which will launch even the Force-Killed Apps, the above two methods does not transition the app to Running state if it was force killed by user
The above point can be helpful in devising overall strategy but does not answer the question, "How to keep syncing the RUNNING state"
i. When your app is Running(Forground/Background), you can do almost anything that is publicly documented, you can keep calling a URL every minute or every 5 seconds, you need to worry about UX on the device rather than approval process, (People will delete app if they see your app in top battery drainers in the settings section)
ii. For making an HTTP call while your app is in background, you can look at Background URL Session, which off loads the HTTP calls to another process so that the call completes even if app gets killed.
iii. For the socket based approach please refer this technical note. The main issue is that you do not/can not know when your app moves from Running to Not Running State.
iv. As you mentioned that your app uses background audio, it will be always be in Running state if the user plays an audio and puts app in background, in such case you can use Periodic Observer to do some Heartbeat call periodically when the content is being played out.
I've spent a lot of time looking at the options but am still not 100% clear, so wanted to reach out for some guidance.
Scenario is this:
User submits an HTTPS request to our backend server for some data via an iOS app
Depending on the data, the first (only) request can take a REALLY long time. like, say, 10+ minutes (shocking i know)
When that payload finally does become available and is returned via the HTTPS request, we then want to use it to update the UI in background.
The assumption here is that the user has moved on to another app whilst waiting for the data to arrive (and lets also assume they haven't killed the app).
Is it possible to handle this via iOS 8+ API's without the app being force/killed by Apple when in the background ?
Could we use background task for example?
var backgroundTask: UIBackgroundTaskIdentifier
xxx.beginBackgroundTaskWithName...
etc
Before testing some code blocks we just wanted to see if someone has (a) already done this and/or (b) whether we're heading in the right direction
Thanks for your help.
You should re-think on your web service which may take almost 10 min to process. If you are not able to optimize server task processing time then below one of the idea may be help you.
You can divided your one request into multiple request to reduce processing time and get response in faster way.
Your server should sent notification to app when its done with its task. So app will came to know task is done.
I am not sure why you try to update UI when apps in background mode , you may try to update UI when users come to foreground mode from background mode.
Please check this link which show as example of long running task. Where its use a blank audio play to keep alive app background task.
You can used "Background fetch" functionality.
For learning purpose you can refer this link
I am developing a VoIP app. When my app is in background I need to check if the server is still there. So I am trying to use setKeepAliveTimeout:handler: to make polls to server while app is in background.
The question is: how to ensure that I receive response or timeout within 5 seconds after I have sent poll message to server? If I don't receive response/timeout within 5 seconds the next opportunity to know that server is dead is only after keepAliveTimeout time which is not that good.
As I understand I can't setup NSTimer in setKeepAliveTimeout:handler: since we are in background (and NSTimer relies on run loop).
I see other possibility which is: make while loop and check for the current time in it. Although I would like to avoid making busy loops.
Could you please suggest me how can I achieve needed behaviour?
Is it possible to interface with a webservice (or, for what matter, do any scheduled local or remote activity) while the app is in background?
I know that you can receive remote pushes or schedule local alerts, but I wonder if I can periodically send my GPS position to a webservice even if the app is not in foreground.
I have been thinking about this myself in an attempt to impress my boss with an iPhone/iPad App that accesses our Web Service.
If the Web Service takes a non-trivial amount of time to process a request then there is absolutely no guarantee that the App won't be interrupted and stopped, therefore making it useless for any business-level tool. The only Apps that are allowed to run for extended periods in the background are a select set that use certain frameworks (music players, etc.).
I concluded that the only way of doing it is to introduce a middle tier that performs and waits for the response from the actual Web Service and provides an interface that the iOS App can poll or be pushed to in order to allow it to sleep/die whenever iOS thinks it should.
You can make sporadic network calls while you are running in the background if you are a location-based app with proper permissions. You need to make sure you are running a background task properly. FYI, there are a number of applications in the app store that do this.