I'm a Java/Web developer and I don't know anything about iPhone applications.
I did search on the Internet and the following steps are what I think people suggested but I want to confirm.
I would like to know if the following steps will allow me to send a content body to SMS messages when a user clicks on a link on a web page.
Build an iPhone app that takes content body and receiver phone number.
Make the visitors to my webpage download the iPhone app in #1 (using javascript to check if s/he already has it and a custom url scheme to open the iPhone version of "PlayStore")
The visitor installs the app.
Call the iPhone app in #1 using a custom URL scheme, from a link on a web page. This link contains the phone number of the receiver and a content body
The iPhone app in #1 then opens the native SMS app in iPhone, this time with a body.
Is this
1. possible ?
2. the right way to do ?
EDIT :
To make things clearer, what I need are...
It shouldn't be the web server that sends the SMS. The client who gave us the job does not want to pay for that. The client wants each visitor send their own SMS and pay for it.
I made a mistake. The phone number of the receiver should be empty. Only the content body is pre populated. So if I clicked on the "send SMS to my friends" link(on a webpage), it opens the native SMS application.(at least, this is how it works on android devices currently). And then the visitor would type in or select the phone number of the receiver from the contacts on his device.
No, you cannot open the SMS app with a message body. The only way to send it is by using MFMessageComposeViewController (iOS 5.0+) as shown in this page. If you need to support earlier versions, you are out of luck.
I'm not sure that Javascript can "check" that the device can run a url scheme either (I'm almost certain it can't check what apps are installed), but I'm not an expert at that kind of stuff.
As far as you are launching your application with some data using Custom URL Schemes this might help you calling your app with some parameters
http://www.idev101.com/code/Objective-C/custom_url_schemes.html
For step #5 its not possible
Short Answers:
No.
No. The "right" version would be to send the SMS from your webserver, using something like NowSMS.
Related
I'm creating an iPhone app that uses the native iOS mail app. Is it possible that when the user clicks either cancel or send in the mail app, it can then redirect back to the app itself without having to reopen it?
Is it then also possible that when the user goes to access the mail portion of the app, it can display the mail app within my app in a webview type manner? Thanks.
No, you cannot change the functionality of another publisher's app, especially Apple's. But it sounds like you can accomplish what your want to do by using MFMailComposeViewController. It allows you to send an email from within your app, i.e. without leaving it to go to the native mail client.
If what you are doing is just sending emails you can display a MFMailComposeViewController to allow user to send emails without leaving the app.
I created an iOS app that registers a new url scheme.
On my development phone, everything works fine. All urls of the new scheme appear underlined, as a link, in the SMS app, notes, email and safari. I can click on the link and my app will be brought up.
However, when I distribute the app to other phones, using an Adhoc provisioning profile, the urls are not recognized only in incoming SMSs. If someone sends a message containing the url to me, it is not underlined as a link. If I send a message containing the url to myself, the link appears only in the sent message, not in the received message.
Has anyone been through this? Any ideas?
I ran out of options....
thanks!
How to develop a sms app for iphone?
Are there any api available to develop this kind of app?
Is there any other way to develop this type of app for iphone apart from using api
Please suggest me some ideas..
Thanks
From what I know, SMS can only be sent from the official SMS app.
You can only forward the user to the application. You may specify the phone number of the recipient. Unfortunately, you can't even specify the content of the SMS, so it's not of much use.
If you are interested : How to programmatically send SMS on the iPhone?
If you are interested in how to design an application that looks like the SMS application, please specify this in your question.
Check the documentation for MFMessageComposeViewController. iOS 4.0 or later is required though.
On earlier OSes your best bet is to open an sms: URL. The URL scheme only allows you to specify the destination number, not the content of the message.
Is it possible to implement IPhone's push notification service for a
Webapp that has an icon on the "desktop"? If so how?
That depends on exactly what you mean by Webapp that has an icon on the "desktop"?
No, if you're referring to a webapp where you have saved a link with Add to Home screen as per this Apple instruction.
Yes, if your webapp is a thin CocoaTouch shell using webkit.
i have an alternative solution for this:
1) create a gmail account and get gpush app on your iphone (setup the gmail in the app).
2) instate of sending direct notification to iphone, you can send an email from your webapp to the gmail account.
3) within 5 sec. you will receive the push notification.
hope this help.
You can always delegate the messaging to 3rd party notification apps.
One great example is Boxcar (http://boxcar.io/).
You can have your web app send notifications via their API and have them delivered to the app. Lastly, you can the use deeplinks in your message to open your webapp to point the user to the content item you wanted to bring their attention to.
No, it's not possible. It's only for cocoa touch (AppStore) apps. If you want more info, take a look on the documentation.
another alternative: use an sms service like http://www.smstrade.de/ to send an sms to the user's phone. That's the way I do it.
Another provider for sending sms as notification is https://bulktrade.de
There works world wide
You can use HTML5 to introduce your own push messages. From wikipedia
"For the client side, WebSocket was to be implemented in Firefox 4,
Google Chrome 4, Opera 11, and Safari 5, as well as the mobile version
of Safari in iOS 4.2.1 Also the BlackBerry Browser in OS7 supports
WebSockets."
To do this, you need your own provider server to push the messages to the clients. If you want to use APN (Apple Push Notification), you must have a native application which must be downloaded through the App Store.
From iOS 6.0 I noticed that a WebApp icon placed on homescreen automaticly refreshes after each webkit open of webapp. Of course if you change this icon on the webserver. So theoretically you can display any informative content in this icon(numbers, status etc) BUT it will not refreshes instantly - only after opening and closing a webkit webapp.
After a review of the iPhone SDK documentation, I have not yet found a way for an application to be written such that it can programmatically process the content of an incoming SMS message within the iPhone platform. The idea would be for such an application to be running in the background and based on specifically formatted SMS messages would be able to take specific actions.
Does anybody know if this is possible with an iPhone SDK application and if so, provide a pointer to information about how this can be done?
Unfortunately, you cannot intercept - or be notified of - incoming SMS messages with the iPhone SDK.
One possible alternative, is to register a custom URL scheme that launches your application when a url with that scheme is embedded in the sms message and the user cicks on it.
to set a custom url scheme, you must implement both the CFBundleURLSchemes and CFBundleURLName keys in your application's info.plist.
In your Application's delegate, you can then implement the application:handleOpenURL: method to get any paramaters that were passed to your App from the url in the SMS message.
I believe that currently the SDK doesn't allow for background apps (except for apple ones).
BREW and J2ME had (and probably still have) ways to launch your app via specially formatted SMS, which may be what the Jeff is referring to.
Apple does have the upcoming Push Server which will allow you to send the user an alert which will give them the option of launching your app, but you cannot launch your app for them.
Unfortunately just registering an URL scheme dosn't help you at all, because the SMS app makes "http://" urls clickable only...
You can use CoreTelephony framework.But you must user some private api.And I have some demo code for this. https://github.com/edison0951/AppNotifyBySMSDemo