I have an app where the requirement is to view all the user-initiated apps, which can be terminated. I tried searching, but didn't find a way to proceed. I am able to get all the processes, including system and user processes,b ut I need to filter only the apps which can be terminated. One way I found could be filtering based on pid, but I am not able to distinguish between pids of user and system processes.
With Apple's SDK this is isn't able and such an application wouldn't get through the approval process of the AppStore. You will need to use a jailbroken iOS device for this kind of job.
Anyway I'd recommend you not to investigate in managing applications manually, since iOS makes a nearly perfect job there already.
Related
I have written an Android application which, even after termination, still runs a service that listens for phone state transitions. This way, the application was able to detect new phone calls and trigger a certain event, for example the dialog partner's number was stored in a database.
Now I am eager to implement this application on iOS as well, but I cannot figure out if it is even possible to listen for phone calls in a similar way. For all I know so far about iOS, whenever my application is terminated by either the user or the OS, it is not possible anymore to detect new phone calls.
Is there any way I can achieve this, or have I already reached a dead end?
EDIT: As it was said to be too broad:
I want to detect both incoming and outgoing calls at any time. It there a way to do this on iOS 10? I do not want code, I just want to know if it is possible.
Please investigate further App Sandbox principe that Apple is using.
In short:
App Sandbox is Based on a Few Straightforward Principles By limiting
access to sensitive resources on a per-app basis, App Sandbox provides
a last line of defense against the theft, corruption, or deletion of
user data, or the hijacking of system hardware, if an attacker
successfully exploits security holes in your app. For example, a
sandboxed app must explicitly state its intent to use any of the
following resources using entitlements:
Hardware (Camera, Microphone, USB, Printer) Network Connections
(Inbound or Outbound) App Data (Calendar, Location, Contacts) User
Files (Downloads, Pictures, Music, Movies, User Selected Files) Access
to any resource not explicitly requested in the project definition is
rejected by the system at run time. If you are writing a sketch app,
for example, and you know your app will never need access to the
microphone, you simply don’t ask for access, and the system knows to
reject any attempt your (perhaps compromised) app makes to use it.
On the other hand, a sandboxed app has access to the specific
resources you request, allows users to expand the sandbox by
performing typical actions in the usual way (such as drag and drop),
and can automatically perform many additional actions deemed safe,
including:
Invoking Services from the Services menu Reading most world readable
system files Opening files chosen by the user The elements of App
Sandbox are entitlements, container directories, user-determined
permissions, privilege separation, and kernel enforcement. Working
together, these prevent an app from accessing more of the system than
is necessary to get its job done.
This might be asking for the moon but here goes...
Is it possible to have an iOS app receive data and then forward it all while running in the background?
We're a restaurant currently using an ordering system that uses a main iPad as the till, with a second iPad in the kitchen to receive orders, and another third iPad used by the servers to take orders. Orders are sent to the main till which relays orders to the kitchen.
Works great... Unless someone switches app on the main till iPad to our other (necessary) hosting app, then all hell breaks loose and all orders stop getting sent.
Developer (small team) has told us it's impossible to solve but I have done some digging into recent Apple APIs that allow simple tasks to run in the background and have seen a few promising options, or perhaps it's possible via the External Accessory Framework, or even syncing via iCloud? A question for the more knowledgable than me, but is there currently a workaround to solve this that I could suggest or are they right in that it's currently impossible in iOS?
Yes there are ways to have an app in the background receive data, generally using either:
beginBackgroundTaskWithName:expirationHandler:
or
beginBackgroundTaskWithExpirationHandler:
Take a look at the Background Execution section in the documentation for more info...
I was trying to get a specific info before a IOS App development task which I searched but couldn't find anything relevant.
Wanted to know whether this requirement restricts (non compliance issue as per publish guidelines) the app to be published in App Store with features as below
User scans and lists all available wifi connections in a tableview
Selects one of the Wifi connection and connects on button click
Stores the password and SSID for future connections.
Would there be any compliance issue related to the same functionalities when submitting to IOS app store. One of my colleague have advised me about the same but not able to explain why? Which I tried to find out searching the internet, but too specific to find anything relevant. Deeply appreciate an Expert advise on this.
Thanks in advance.
I can't find anything in the Review Guidelines that would object your app idea: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines
A couple of areas where you should have a more detailed look:
2.5.1 Apps may only use public APIs.
2.5.9 Apps that alter the functions of standard switches, such as the Volume Up/Down and Ring/Silent switches, or other native user
interface elements or behaviors will be rejected.
5.1 Privacy
Technically, I'm not sure if it's even possible to change the WIFI not via the settings app, so I'd have a look their first. (https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/1592/is-there-an-ipod-app-to-easily-switch-wifi-on-and-off)
I don't believe I've ever seen an app or a way to change SSID outside the Settings app. I explored a way to detect network changes, connects, disconnects, which work fine while the app is running. I was never able to influence how the user connected, just that a change happened. It also falls apart pretty quickly when the user backgrounds the app. Trying to keep a background task open long enough to poll the current connection fails pretty fast.
I wish Apple would provide some system level notification of Wifi connect events. This could be very useful to developers that want a little more control than Background App Refresh events.
I work as a software developer, but I am absolutely new to Apple in general. We have the following case in a project, and we have not been able to figure out a solution for it, I would really appreciate some advise to find a solution (or drop the case if not possible)
A (potential) customer with multiple retail stores is interested in having a very simple app to display some content (this could an image or html, nothing too complicated) and periodically update this content from a server (this requirement is important). So it is very simple case, to use the device screen as advertising space
But here is the catch, users should be able to go out of this app and check out the device's system and other apps, and then the content should come back on the foreground when the device is idle. So basically we need something like a screensaver app that fetches the content (images) from a server and keeps them updated.
We have been looking at the guided access mode, but we are not sure it fulfills the requirements, because of the following issues
- Allowing the user to check out the device system and other apps. As far as we understood guided access restricts the device to one app.
- Re-launch the app (or bring it to the foreground) when the device has been idle for a period of time.
Note that we should account for a variety of devices (iPhone and iPads) with different OS versions
I appreciate your help and ideas. Thanks.
Apple does not allow apps to run continuously in the background except for a small limited group of exceptions. (music playing apps, for example.)
It's possible to set up your app to pretend to be a music playing app, and stay running in the background, but that means you will not be allowed on the app store.
Your client may be able to use the enterprise program to create apps for use in their retail stores. Enterprise apps don't have to go through the app store approval process.
I did this for a client recently (for an enterprise app.) As I recall I would have the app request background processing as soon as it moved to the background, and when it was notified that it's background time was ending, I would play a short "silence" sound and request another block of background time. Unfortunately it was work for hire and the contract ended, so I did not retain the source code.
I need to do a study of what apps are actually used among a group of test users taking part of an experiment. I would like to know the time each of the random 3rd party apps have been used to do statistics on it. If possible, I plan on distributing an iOS app through TestFlight. My app will gather the app usage statistics and send it to my server.
The overall goal is to get total usage time for each installed app on a daily base from each of the users taking part of the experiment.
What I have:
One of my ideas are to develop an app that will use the VoIP backgrounding profile (or similar) to run in the background and periodically (like every 10 secs) log the name or bundle identifier of the current foreground app (if any).
I have found a method to get the current running processes: Can we retrieve the applications currently running in iPhone and iPad
The method described in the above post gives a struct kinfo_proc that includes other structs with information such the process name, priority and running time (including time spent in the background). I have not been able to identify a flag revealing what process is in the foreground. Also the priority does not seem to be a reliable indictor. Something I'm missing here?
The above method can be used to get the current running time for a process, but as each app can be sleeping in the background for days (or weeks) this is a poor indicator for how much the app has actually been used. If I could kill all the running user installed apps every hour or so I could get an indicator of how often apps are used. The most used apps would be cold-started by the user more often. But that would give an unpleasant experience for the testers as apps are killed randomly. But anyway, is there a way I can kill another process?
Another idea is to traverse through the view hierarchy to probe the label of the leftmost app in the task bar. Any ideas of how this might be possible to hack?
I had another idea of analyzing device logs and gathering app usage statistics that way. However it seems that app background-foreground switching activity is not logged to the system console. Is there some other logs containing this information or can I get it somehow by enabling energy diagnostics logging?
If I had my test users set up to use Apple Mobile Device Management (MDM) would I then be able to collect the information I am interested in?
Any ideas are very much appreciated.
A few notes:
My test users does not have jailbroken devices, but I can use private APIs as I am not distributing through the App Store.
I would use an analytics tool like Flurry Analytics to get the data concerning usage statistics, which you could then download into your app using their API. They can get you very details stats on how your users are using your app, how frequently, etc. It's a great tool, plus it's free!