I am developing a business app for use on an iPad/iPod Touch. I am wondering if there is a way to restrict usage on the device to my app only. In other words, we don't want employees installing other apps such as games and playing around with the devices.
Yes, that's possible.
Check out the iOS Configuration Profile Programming Guide.
Edit: See the section about restrictions, it will allow you to do exactly what you need. Note however that you'll need to have access to those devices, ideally the devices should be company property. And you need to distribute your app via Enterprise Distribution.
Edit 2: Since iOS6, this feature is available through the normal settings app. It is called "Guided Access" and is part of the Accessibility settings. It will let you disable the home button (cancel guided access by triple-clicking the home button and enter the preset code) and it will even let you define areas within apps which should be disabled.
I don't think so, unless their device is jailbroken.
If they're logged into an Exchange server you could remote-wipe their phone if they install anything.
Do you provide the devices? Or they bring their own?
If you provide the devices that would mean you can use your Apple-id. If an employee would try to download any other app he would need the password of your Apple-id. So thats a simple way to prevent that.
Im am not sure if there is a total "lock" of such type.
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I'm managing few iOS devices, so I want to create a app to add security feature like collecting the user information from the user like UserID to track which user is currently using the device .
Desired output:
So I want to trigger my app as soon as a user unlock the device and without giving the details the user should not able to access the home screen of the Device.
Is it possible to do it with any framework in iOS without Jailbreak ?
No its not possible. iOS does not allows application to manage device with it self. Application should work in the pre given area which is called Sandbox. So its not possible to handle the entire device and you can not check it that who is using the device.
This is not possible, you should look to Mobile Device Management solutions and rather go that route. You could also look at apple's business solutions.
I need to crate app, one of it is features to check if user is using Facebook or whats App during driving is it doable.
For privacy matters, Apple does not allow iOS apps to access other application's data, such as when the user enters them and other "sensitive" data of that sort. So, the simple answer is that you cannot do that. Another App's usage is undeterminable as of now on iOS.
Either way. Even if iOS apps are allowed to fetch data from other apps, you have to make sure your app is running on background and checking. iOS manage memory itself and kills app in background automatically. So the app is not practical. Plus if you constantly check the speed in background, the battery life will decrease.
But again on the first hand as other answers, your app does not allowed to access data. So this is not doable.
It is not possible , as apple does not allow iOS Apps fetching or accessing other apps data. Thanks
Is is possible to dynamically figure out the position of an app's icon on the home screen of an iphone/ipad?
Sorry I don't have enough credit to comment yet so I'm posting here.
To my knowledge no you cannot natively or easily do this. I know of no open source or other libraries. The reason being that your app exists in its own world, it is not in touch per say with the rest of the device. It can get permissions to read and write data but it doesn't know of itself.
Does that make sense?
When you open a website it cannot know which tab it is in the browser. Instead it knows how it was accessed and what device (physically) is using it. It knows the user-agent, the time, the browser, etc because that is information sent to it in the request. In turn the phone on launch gives data to the app in how to handle it but not for example how many other apps are running, or where it is on the screen. It's not normally considered relevant to run time. In addition it's a security feature in preventing an app from deleting or altering other apps, as well as itself. If you have an iPhone you will notice that SIRI cannot turn off google maps navigation or any other non-apple specific app. Only apps natively comparable and private party ones (ex apples) are accessible because Apple did that intentionally. They all know of their own existence and each others. However non-native in the sense of apps that do not come preinstalled and manufactured by the company creating the device are less trustworthy, in addition there are no guarantees about how they will be run by the device, where they will be, or what other apps will be there.
It is true that an app can request for another app it may be comparable with but it is up the user to handle that information.
May I ask for curiosities sake why you are trying to do this? Are there any other workarounds?
However in terms of it being physically possible, yes. I doubt that apple allows independent developers to do this however. But an example of this occurring may be gridlock where a user can move their apps around differently on the screen. The app in this case has the ability to access app position. But I believe in this case app position is about the UI and not about nested files. apps cannot to my knowledge modify information outside of their own file. Imagine if you had an app that could edit other games scores.
It is not possible to dynamically find out the position of an app's icon on the Home Screen (even for jailbreak apps). Apple wants you to respect the user's privacy settings.
Extra Info - There is popular JavaScript library that adds a promo bubble to the bottom of your mobile web application, inviting users to bookmark the app to their device's home screen.
Recently i visited a restaurant and they use iPad for ordering. When i tried to close the app by pressing the home button it did not close. Rather it blinked (may be went to background and came up again i don't know). then i was prompted for admin password.
But when i searched stack overflow most answers suggest that it is not possible. As per my understanding i can use development certificate and implement this in my personal device. May be the restaurant might have also done that.
Can someone shed some light on how to achieve this functionality?
You can put an iPad into Kiosk mode.
This will essentially lock it into a particular app with a pass key required to do anything else.
http://www.ipadenclosures.com/blog/posts/your-ipad-into-a-kiosk
This has nothing to do with objective-c. It's a feature on iPhones and iPads called Guided Access: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5509?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
There are a few ways you can do it - One of the simplest is through guided access
Another, even more secure, is through Apple Configurator - When you supervise a device you can lock it to one app and disable the controls just as with the guided access method. With this method you can supervise multiple devices and apply standard configurations quickly by simply plugging them into your Mac's USB port.
I want to create an app which has the following features.
Track friends / family members location
Locate/track the stolen device location
Lock the device, delete the device datas by using desktop or by SMS.
Most of the above features are provided by Apple's "Find my iPhone" app. But I just want to know whether is it possible to create such an app.
From my understanding, Apple wont let the developers to use private API's and they wont allow to erase datas (like Messages, Calls details) remotely.
Please suggest me some ideas.
If you create any app which directly competes with any of the apples build app will be rejected by appstore.. But most of the above things you can do with private api's and with the help of a web service..
It wasn't possible prior to iOS7. App was not able to respond to any remote calls. There is a new API which "can" be used to solve similar things: http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/iphone/ios-7-sdk-mutlitasking-enhancements/ or http://www.objc.io/issue-5/multitasking.html (Remote notifications). You may be able to track your friends or stolen device, but not to lock or erase it.
There is a way to remotely erase the iPhone without Apple's Find My iPhone - via Exchange account. There are some open source implementations of MS Exchange, so there may be a chance to make a service which would be able to wipe the device. But even when you make that service, there will be a need to add the "exchange account" into the iDevice. I am not aware of any function which can do so programmatically.
Anyway - You can do an app which is similar to Apple's apps, but it must be somehow different. It must provide some special content or functionality, otherwise it will be rejected.