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.
Related
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.
My iOS app uses CoreData as its data store and I have added a watchOS app to accompany it. Currently the workflow between the iOS and watchOS apps is as follows:
The watchOS app exposes a menu representing a subset of functions available in the iOS app
Choosing one of these options sends a message to the iOS app telling it which option was selected
The iOS app responds by packaging up any data needed by the watch for that particular function into a dictionary and sending this back to the watch in the reply handler
The watchOS app presents an interface to the user allowing them to change the values in the data
Each change sends a message to the iOS app which updates the core data store with the new values
This is working fine but clearly requires the phone to be connected to the watch throughout the use of the app for it to work. I'm wondering whether a model like the following would be possible:
As above
As above
As above
3a. The watch stores the data locally
As above
Each change updates the watch app's local copy of the data
The user can later check the data back in to the iOS app at which point it is merged into the core data database
I can guarantee that conflicts would not be an issue as the user would never be able to modify data which had already been created on the phone (it is not a requirement of the app to be able to do so).
So my question is, would the latter case allow the watchOS app to operate independently of the iOS app with the exception of transferring data, and is this a preferable method to the way I am handing this currently?
It's simpler for your watch app to be dependent on the phone. It's more complex for it to operate independently of the phone. Only you can
answer whether the added complexity to support true independence is worth it, since you're the person who has to implement, support, and maintain any additional code needed.
Do the changes make the watch app independent?
No, they don't let the watch app operate independently, since the watch still must request/receive data from the phone during steps 2 and 3.
For the watch app to be completely independent while away from the phone, it would have to query a local copy of the data which the phone updated as needed, instead of requiring the phone to send any remote data that the watch needs.
Is the change preferable?
Not as it stands. Your proposed change to defer updating the phone (even though it's still reachable) may require much unnecessary code related to locally storing data for the present, and merging updates back to the phone in the future.
Also, while you promise there presently is no merge conflict to deal with, there's no guarantee that any revisions you make to your app in the future won't introduce the possibility for conflicts to occur.
If you choose to establish two persistent stores, it would make your app less fragile to implement a merge policy now, to avoid your updates from completely failing to save, should a future conflict occur.
The real question...
Is the freedom to operate away from the phone (for hours) worth showing stale (or possibly misleading) data to the user?
Unless you also provide an indication showing when the data was refreshed by the phone, the user may assume that the displayed information is current and accurate, even though it may be hours old.
This adds more complexity to the watch app either in the user-facing UI or behind the scenes to handle stale data.
For your consideration, Apple Watch's Weather app simply shows no data at all when it can't obtain the current weather data from the phone (since users would want to know the current temperature and chance of precipitation).
I am developing an application for security purpose which has 1 requirement as "Wipe out iPhone or i pad data completely if device is stolen".
While doing search for this functionality, I came across one application "Find My iPhone" here which supports this feature of "remotely wipe out all data".
(http://www.howtogeek.com/77158/how-to-remotely-lock-or-wipe-your-ios-5-device/)
But i want to this functionality through programmatically in my app.Can someone give me a solution for this problem?
And is it possible to do this functionality through programmatically?
You cannot completely wipe a standard iPhone's data from an app. The app runs in a sandbox environment so you cannot access data from other apps or iOS itself meaning that you cannot wipe it. That being said, you could wipe photos and contacts programmatically as long as the user grants you access to contacts and photos.
There is NO WAY that Apple would let programmers wipe data remotely for the entire device.
Instead of doing that, maybe you should have functionality in your app where if server returns a particular flag, you would delete all the data stored locally on your app, by you (like login details for your app, personal data stored in Documents). I suggest that, because I've done it before.
Right now we are designing an app in Swift that fetches HTML applications from a server in form of zip files and then run it in the iOS app as an web view. Each zip files is of approx 4-5 mb in size. We have 30+ HTML applications in our app as of now. But we may reach to 150-200 apps soon enough. I would like to know the maximum amount of data that an iOS app can handle. If excess amount of data gets deleted, where will it go? Will it be stored in iCloud before the data gets deleted? Please help me. P.S. The HTML applications will be downloaded from the servers in form of zip files , it'll be extracted and then will be stored as a folder. When the user first installs the app in his system , he won't have any html applications installed. He'll have to fetch the apps one by one according to his requirements.
Since you're saving the content to disk, the limitation is the disk size of the user's device. It also depends on where you're saving the data: If you save to the tmp directories, the data may get deleted, but if you're saving to the application's normal directory it will also be backed up to iCloud (assuming the user backs up).
I would advise against filling up the user's phone with hundreds of MB of data automatically, they will get very annoyed at you. So you will want to offer them a UI to actually select which content they want to keep and which should be removed.
No limit as far as I know.
But be aware that all files you download and store in the app have to be marked as "do not backup in iCloud" - otherwise Apple will reject your binary when you submit it to the store.
See
Apple Documentation and
Excluding files from iCloud Backup
My advice,
Don't download all the applications at once, instead provide user a UI from which he can able to select any application (only one at a time, because at any point he'll be able to run single app only, I guess), then download that particular application (also removed if any previous installed app found).
But wait, there's one more option, you can keep 3 apps at a time, and I believe they wouldn't cost you more than 20Mbs (as you said, 4-5Mbs / app). If so user may have feel of switching between (last used) three apps. If he want any other application then he can select any app, here you need to delete (a app from last three) and add newly downloaded app, this means at any point you'll have 3 apps in your directory.
Now the problem of preserving user information (for individual apps), here you can use any local db (or your server or any third party servers) to store (preserve) user information for particular app. At any point he'll delete the app (you should keep backup of it before deletion will be made).
Later, when he changed his mind, and download the app (previously deleted), then you can restore the information (which was preserved before).
Good luck! Don't wash your hands :)
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.