... for example, by finding your contacts that have iTunes logins.
Why? We're launching an app on iOS. We'd like a feature to allow users to connect with their friends who can download and install the app.
No. The closest you might get (from the top of my head) is Game Center. All your friends on there are guaranteed to have an iOS device. Of course, not all iPhone owners use Game Center.
It is possible because Apple uses it in their own apps:
Messages - when typing in an email. The text will appear red if the email you want to iMessage is not setup with iMessage
Find My Friends - same kind of thing
However it's probably a closed API that they're using. It's possible that they use the now deprecated udid retrieval method.
You could try to query an Apple Server for the Apple ID and see what kind of response you get (just a shot in the dark there). Or you could search through GameCenter for a list of friends. Facebook might have some information on which users are iOS users too, take a look at their API and some Facebook profiles to see if theres anything you could check there.
Related
I had a question concerning the Facebook iOS SDK that has been troubling me ever since i started my iOS project so I thought I could post it here to see if any of you had wisdom to share on this matter.
For my Facebook connected app to function properly I need to have access to the Facebook user's complete friend list along with their names, ids and profile pictures. After some intensive research I was surprised to learn that in version 2.0 of the Graph API Facebook has made it so that you can only retrieve a friend list of your friends who are currently using the app and have approved the app. This kind of data doesn't really work for my app as the main point is that you are met by your friend list as opposed to an empty list with only a few people who have approved the app.
My question is if there is any possible way for me to have access to the user's full friend list and display it in a table view with their profile picture without every single one of them having to approve the app. I don't mind if it is a complicated solution. The reason I ask this is because i have seen several apps that can fetch full friends lists such as:
http://www.connect.com
and
http://www.birthdayboardapp.com
and they must have found a way to do it as the way Connect displays the user's friend list is exactly the way I would like to do it i.e. in an iOS contacts app style way.
I would be grateful for any guidance or solutions,
Thanks Again!
P.S. Here are some questions I have previously looked at but do not suggest possible workarounds
Facebook Graph Api v2.0+ - /me/friends returns empty, or only friends who also use my app
Get ALL User Friends Using Facebook Graph API - Android
There are no workarounds, if it works in some other App then it just means that they are still using a Facebook App created before end of April 2014. They will stop getting the full friendlist after April 2015, when v1.0 Apps will get upgraded.
There are ways to get the whole friendlist like invitable_friends and taggable_friends, but those endpoints are supposed to get used for very specific tasks (for inviting in games and for tagging).
I want my app to create a new Facebook group chat with certain people that opens either on Facebook's site in Safari or in the native Facebook app when the user presses a button. I want Facebook to handle the whole chat and my app only to initiate it somehow in the cleanest and least involved way possible. My app already uses the Facebook SDK to open an active FBSession, so I've already got login credentials.
Looking around online and in Facebook's docs, I can't find anything that suits my needs. The closest thing I found was in this answer containing a list of Facebook app URLs you can connect to that open the Facebook app to certain pages. There's "fb://chat/(initWithUID:)" and "fb://messaging/compose/(initWithUID:)". However, not only is there no explanation on how to use these, but people say that Facebook has changed these URLs (and does not have any documentation on them), so they don't work anymore unless I reverse-engineer new URLs (which could change again). Ugh, so close!
I also found examples on starting chats with the Facebook Chat API, but that involves logging into Facebook using some networking framework then writing my own GUI and model for sending messages, which I am only prepared to do as a last resort. There should be some way to let the Facebook app or website do all that. Does anyone know how I can do this?
I've found something very close, but I still don't see a way to make my app initialize it with the desired group of friends:
The Facebook SDK has a message dialog that can appear for sending messages to friends. This isn't exactly what I wanted but is good enough because it means that all the programming is already done for me by Facebook, and users should be able to see these messages on https://facebook.com and the Facebook apps. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ios/share#message-dialog
My iOS app gives the user the option to login using their Facebook account. I would like to be able to see the list with all the friends and invite the ones selected to use the app. The problem is that using the app request window, the friends get a notification that is displayed somewhere in the App Center, rather than in the Notifications panel. Unfortunately, this sort of notification is very subtle and might not be seen only after a long time.
From obvious reasons, I cannot fetch the emails of friends as this would be a great alternative.
Do you know if there is a way to send a Facebook Message or some other sort of notification that is more 'visible' to the receiver? Thanks!
I'm not sure if I completely understand your problem. If it's the problem that I think you're having, it sounds like you need to fill out more information on your Facebook App's configuration page.
From what I remember when I had this same issue, you need to have a Canvas URL set in your Facebook App's configuration page. Even if your app is not going to use Canvas, you need to have that part filled out in order for your friends to receive the app's notification jewel on Facebook.
I want to add Facebook/Twitter posting in my app using SLComposeViewController in iOS6 and I just want to add a check if the user is already logged in to Facebook/Twitter on device. So my question is that is it even necessary to add this sort of a check? Does iOS 6 handle this automatically? If I do need to add it, how can it be done? I've looked around a bit but I can't find much help on this.
Thanks
In my opinion it's a bug, but if the user has not set up a Twitter/Facebook account on their device already, it will not appear in the UIActivity action sheet.
With the stock iOS 6 Apple apps, this bug doesn't exist, so when the user taps on Twitter on the action sheet and if they haven't set up an account yet, a UIAlert will come up and ask the user if they wish to go to Settings to configure a new account. Unfortunately 3rd party apps don't get this until or IF the bug is fixed.
I want to programmatically track my app's search ranking on Apple's app store. Is there any API or website to do this, outside of the 'App Store' app on my iPhone?
the following websites allow searching the iOS app store.
https://theappstore.org
http://fnd.io
I'm not sure how the exact ranking is reflected, but Apple now provides an JSON API call that you can make.
https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/itunes-store-web-service-search-api/
This includes the ability to add in a callback parameter so you can even incorporate it into a web app without having to parse the results on your server.
The end API call would looks something like this:
http://itunes.apple.com/search?term=props&entity=software&country=US&callback=lkasdfj
In case users are still looking for this. Apple finally made it possible to just use the apple.com website:
https://www.apple.com/ios/app-store/ Use the magnifying glass in the top right to search the apps.
Once you find the app you want, there is a unique URL that you could use to grab information for tracking or other purposes as well.
You can't do anything other than look at the app information at this time (no way to initiate a remote install to your phone or leave a review, that has to be done on the device)
You can use the google advance search option like
site:itunes.apple.com/us/ "requires iOS 9 or later"
and then scrape the response.
You can use data.ai formerly App Annie. The free version will give you daily and overall search ranking for your app, and will help you immensely in ASO (App store optimization)