Today I downloaded the new Google Music app for iOS and it immediately had me signed in already. I assume they accomplished this using one of the other Google Apps on my phone. To keep this appropriate for StackOverflow, here's the question, specific and objective:
How (technically) can an app (like Google Music) authenticate a user using data from another app (like Google Search or Google Chrome)? I was under the impression that apps in iOS were entirely sand boxed.
I'm very curious in finding a technical explanation for this, so if someone could recommend a way to rephrase or retag the question, please feel free to edit or migrate.
iOS Keychain can be shared with your other apps via access groups, see this for example.
Related
Apologies if this is a rubbish question, but it's something I've never had to give much thought and I'm short on time. I have a Web App which is required to run offline and on iOS. This Web App has a lot of content consisting mainly of videos. One solution we are thinking of is to utilise DropBox's or Google Drive's API's to download the content and access it.
The main issue with this is whether you can access a native app (DropBox or Google Drive) from a browser or Web App. Does anyone know if this is possible?
Ideas so far are:
Access Drop Box or Google Drive native app from a web app (not sure if this is possible and is the current question)
Wrap up the web app to make it a hybrid native app using something like Phone Gap (this is plan B but will have its own issues)
Convert to a Google Chrome App to get improved access to Google Drive API (not sure how this would function on iOS)
Start from scratch and build a native iOS app (a longer term solution)
Thanks
Chris
Late, but maybe helpful: www.cloudrail.com
It's a useful Javascript library to access the Dropbox and Google Drive API
We ended up making a hybrid app using PhoneGap for iOS.
I hope this is not off topic for StackOverflow since it is not just software development related but also marketing. But I guess this problem is something we developers are all confronted to.
To monitor and market our iOS app, we use a bunch of third party SDKs:
Google Analytics to understand what's happening
a push notification system (e.g. Urban Airship)
a "smart" review prompting engine (e.g. Apptentive)
a testing / crash reporting system (e.g. Testflight)
should you want to run app installs ads, you also need the FB SDK, an SDK to track Twitter conversions, etc.
you may also want to track where other installs come from via something like Tapstream.
So we are already running more than 6 3rd party SDKs in our app, and it does not feel right:
each of them will do some kind of hand shake every time the app is opened
it's as many potential issues
each of them will have a different web interface
Is there a way to optimise all this, i.e. to have just one SDK doing most things? Or does someone know of a lib to wrap all this stuff under one lib for instance?
There is no getting around a few of these. If you want to talk with FaceBook, Twitter, etc. You will need their SDK no matter the 3rd party SDK you choose.
You could actually write your own setup to track and deal with everything, but there are those that have done it before.
For example, Parse will do:
Analytics
push notifications
a "smart" review prompting engine (you can do this yourself by reviewing the analytics)
crash reporting system
it also uses FB SDK, Twitter SDK already to help with user logins where users my want to use their credentials from their sites on your app
user login
cloud database
You could technically throw an "event" into the analytics to track how many folks are using your app that was installed from x store. However, this would require a different version of your app for each store. Sounds like an interesting idea none the less. Tapstreme and others are basically marketing though, not really something required to do something specific. You will need an SDK if they are tracking something specific themselves.
one web interface
There are multiple systems built like this. they are called BaaS or Backend as a Service.
Hope this helps, Cheers
I have created a game for iOS and I want to be able to track when people are playing.
By this, I simply mean I want to know how often people are opening the app (and thus find out if users are returning or playing it only once).
Because of this, I don't want to have to include the entire Google Analysics SDK in my project. Does anyone know if it's possible to make a request from in an iOS app (possibly using NSURLRequest?) to call Google Analytics and make it think a web page has been visited?
Thanks in advance.
I want to track my app may be launched by referrals from ad campaigns, websites, or other apps. Therefore, I'm using Google Analytics iOS SDK. Here's guiding document https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ios/v3/campaigns. According to this document, I'll write my own implementation code in application:handleOpenURL: method.
With Android SDK, Google Play app broadcasts an INTENT_REFERRER to our app during installation. This intent contains the value of the referrer parameter of the link used to reach your app's Google Play Store page, if one was present. So, my question is that "Are there any similar things in iOS? How to test it?".
Thanks and best regard,
iTunes doesn't broadcast anything similar to intent_referrer at present. If you use Google Analytics for iOS installs, GA uses Identifier for Advertiser (IDFA) for tracking. When a user taps on an advertisement from a supported network on an app, the IDFA is sent to Google. Then, when your app launches, the IDFA is sent again and compared to list of IDFAs that Google stored from previous taps. That way they can give attribution.
It's obviously not as clean as intent_referrer, but it's the best one can do at present. You can also try fingerprinting etc with Appsflyer, MobileAppTracking etc, but I don't know how accurate those are. I've heard they're not very accurate, but they're better than nothing.
Apple announced adding support for campaign tracking in iTunes Connect. But, we haven't heard about it for a very long time now. So, I won't hold my breath. Hope this helps!
I have iOS application that I would like to promote on different web-sites.
In Google Store I can record Campaign name and use it in application. I'm looking for something similar for iOS but I can't find.
Is it possible at all?
Try to use Mobile App Tracker. It has ability to track publishers statistics. For example it could track how many users installed your app, first sales, custom events and etc. from each promote web site,
There is a Google Analytics SDK for iOS. This link leads to the iOS page for campaign measurement in Google Analytics. As far as I can tell, it works exactly the same as the Android SDK that you linked to in your question. Good luck!