I have a couple apps on the Apple App Store and would like some way to send announcements to users whenever I want. Basically, I want to remotely change the text of an IUAlertview and only trigger it to appear if I want it to (upon app opening and only if I updated the message).
So far I have no problem making the IUAlertview appear on when the app opens, and I can easily program an NSUserDefault flag to only make the IUAlertview appear under certain circumstances, but really have no idea how to dynamically change the UIAlertview text without resubmitting my app to Apple continuously.
Can someone please explain how this is done? Thanks!
One way to do this is to have your app periodically (or upon each launch) check a file on a website that you control and if there is changed text (or a version number, or newer date than the last time an alert was displayed) there, then display that changed text in your UIAlertView.
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I want to update an iOS application, so it only contains a splash screen that says: we are working on updating the app as soon as possible, stay tuned for the next version.
I don't want to remove it from sale, and i also don't want new users to interact with the application, i just want to show them a page with a message.
Is this against apple rules? will they accept my update?
Too simple applications usually don't pass through the Appstore validation.
Have a look a the official documentation : App Store Review Guidelines.
2.12 Apps that are not very useful, unique, are simply web sites bundled as Apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may
be rejected
It's likely it'll be blocked for 2.1 (App Completeness), or 4.2 (Minimum Functionality), but can't be answered conclusively without trying it.
for situations like these you should implement some kind of functionality in your app that lets you control those "maintenance periods" without updating the app. for example some kind of API that returns a special http status code when the app should not be usable for a specific time. then you can react on that status code and show the user some kind of "maintenance message". as soon as you're done you can easily reenable functionality.
This almost certainly won't make it past review. The only way you could do this (and I wouldn't advise it) is to add a splash screen behind a feature flag that you activate remotely after review.
Is there a way to set the icon badge to an exclamation mark?
Messages uses this feature if a message could not be send, but I'm not able to find something about this.
At the moment, you cannot set the app's icon badge text to anything other than a number. What you have seen in the messages app is only one of the "privileges" of the apps built by Apple, to give their users a better experience. But for matters of security, Apple does not allow developers to do that, because who knows in what way a dev will program his app to start spamming with unwanted messages in the badges of the app.
Instead of that, you can just put a normal badge number and send a local notification with the desired text to catch the user's attention.
Hope it helps!
This question already has an answer here:
How to send in-app announcements to people using my iOS app?
(1 answer)
Closed 7 years ago.
I would like to add a text feed to my iOS app. Basically, it would just be an updatable UITextView or UIScrollView that would display announcements/news (not an actual news or RSS feed though) on the home page. I want to be able to update this field remotely from my computer to give it a set number of messages/announcements to display one after another in a loop. I don't want to have to update the app to manually add them in via Xcode. I only know Objective-C.
How would I do this? I can't seem to find any tutorials for it. Maybe I'm just not searching in the right way. Can someone refer me to a guide or tutorial or even just a GitHub project I could implement? Thanks.
Edit: I see that a similar question has been asked after all, but I still don't understand the answer given. I'm still new to coding apps so I don't know how to use "initWithContentsFromURL." The person clearly knew what they were doing and so they did not get further explanation. Are there any good guides on how to implement this? I understand you would need to set up a website to store the data, but I'm not quite sure how you would do that. An example of the whole process of setting up the website to store this data and then retrieve it with the function would be helpful.
Look at push notification APN, there is a good tutorial for how to implement push notification
If the messages will only be displayed while the user is inside the app, there is no need for push notifications (which will also allow you to contact the user when the app is closed). The app can simply check with a remote server for the most updated content that needs to be displayed whenever the user launches the app (or whenever he/she enters the screen, or once a day - depending on how often you plan to update that info).
I was wondering how it works to make changes to an app without re-uploading the binary and go through the whole process again. I have got an example for it:
The developer of Whatsapp made changes to his app twice already, just today for the second time. This "update" included the blue indicators which show wether the chat-partner read your message or not. The 1st time I noticed changes to the app without an update was when he introduced voice messages.
Does anyone have an idea how this works?
You can use Google Tag Manager to make simple tweaks to your app without having to update the entire app. Here is an overview of how it can work (I've used this on Android apps)
Suppose your app's interface is supplied in whole or in part from a server - i.e., it's really a web view showing HTML that you are serving. Then you can just change the code on the server.
Is there a way to add functions to IOS through an app (preferably that can be done in Xcode) that also work outside of the app itself? For example (while the app is running in the background) every time a user presses the spacebar in safari, any entered text will be copied to the clipboard. Thanks!
No - this is not possible and could lead to apps intercepting sensitive data like bank account password etc. You can receive other notifications like push notifications and gps data though.