I have an idea for an iPhone app that will make billions of dollars for me, and help me take over the world. I am currently designing the architecture of the application. I had originally assumed that I would need to create and host a database that would allow users to upload their data and share it with other, targeted, users. But I thought it would be better if the users could send their data directly to each other without having it stored in a database. However, I haven't been able to find anything that would suggest this is possible.
Is it possible to send data between iPhones that are not in close proximity (bluetooth) and not on a LAN? For instance...User #1, who is in Tennessee, creates some information and hits "Send to others" and it sends that information directly to User #2, who is in Arizona, and User #3, who is in Maine. Could the text messaging functionality be hacked to do that?
(I realize that the phones belonging to Users #2 and #3 would have to be on, and running the app that would receive the data)
I am new to mobile development, and I am still getting used to the functionality of mobile devices so, I am certain this is a dumb question. But, it is worth asking because, if it can be done, this would dramatically change the architecture (and maintenance costs) of this application.
Thanks, in advance, for whatever advice/pointers you can give.
This is something handled by using the publish - subscribe pattern. You may want to look into a plug 'n play service such as pubnub. That will let you do just that. Phones that should be receiving each other's messages will have listeners set up on the same pubnub channel, and will receive a notification when any of the other phones publish to that channel. Something like pubnub has a pretty simple API/SDK that you can use to get a prototype up and running pretty quickly (and for free, at least at first).
User #1's app sends the message to your server. You server does an APNS push to the phones of users #2, and #3. They don't even need to be running the app.
No need to mark this correct or up-vote it, but I will take a high-paying job in the new world order.
Amazon has an application service called Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) which Allows you to create queue's with messages in them tat app's can subscribe to.
To quote their page:
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly
scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between
computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data
between distributed components of their applications that perform
different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component
to be always available. Amazon SQS makes it easy to build an automated
workflow, working in close conjunction with the Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the other AWS infrastructure web services.
Amazon SQS works by exposing Amazon’s web-scale messaging
infrastructure as a web service. Any computer on the Internet can add
or read messages without any installed software or special firewall
configurations. Components of applications using Amazon SQS can run
independently, and do not need to be on the same network, developed
with the same technologies, or running at the same time.
They have an iOS API to integrate it into your app, and it is free for up to 100,000 messages per month and then $0.01 per 10,000 messages after that.
More info here:
http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/
Is it possible to send data between iPhones that are not in close
proximity (bluetooth) and not on a LAN?
The two devices obviously need some kind of connectivity.
For instance...User #1, who is in Tennessee, creates some information
and hits "Send to others" and it sends that information directly to
User #2, who is in Arizona, and User #3, who is in Maine. Could the
text messaging functionality be hacked to do that?
The problems here are:
helping each device discover the correct address for the others, and...
ensuring that the devices can reach each other.
Mobile devices are constantly moving around on the network and changing their IP addresses as they go. As you're driving to work, your device may have Internet access through it's 3G connection, except for those times when you're driving through a tunnel and don't have any connectivity at all. Once you enter your building, a wifi connection becomes available, so the device switches to that. But your company's network has a firewall that blocks incoming connections, and it's impossible to know in advance which IP address you'll get from the DHCP server at any given time anyway. The same is true for the folks in Arizona and Maine and wherever else.
A server, on the other hand, is usually located at an address that's both easy to discover (thanks to the Domain Name System), easy to reach, and almost always available. For those reasons, it's common to have mobile devices communicate with each other by going through an intermediate server.
Related
I live in an area where net access is mobile or nothing. While I can occasionally get access by tethering a mobile to that network, it isn't often connected, and when it isn't connected, no local device will function on its own, no matter which protocol it uses. Why isn't there any kind of server/cloud resiliency built in where devices can communicate in a peer fashion like Apple's Bonjour (Rendezvous? I can't remember)? If I have an Echo device, I should be able to switch it on through an Alexa interface. I'm OK without speech processing which requires interpretation of commands through an AWS or Google or Apple or whatever cloud, but being able to locally control a switch seems as though the interface could be smart enough to route locally. I guess I may have just answered my question. It seems as though routes could be internally stored so as to not to definitely require a server. Can you imagine shipping a colony to Mars and all the IoT devices stop working? If you ask me, they should not require a branch variation or special programming in order to function.
From the experience of having sat down and built a few, there are a some key reasons why viable IoT gadget products for the general market typically end up having to have a cloud-mediated mode, no matter what was envisioned when the design effort originally commenced:
General consumers (at least think) they want the option to control things when outside the home
Often even at home, a mobile phone may be on the mobile network not wifi, meaning that even if the user is physically inside their home, in network terms, they are not.
Firmware updates, dynamic content, etc are easier when they don't have to be relayed through a mobile phone or PC, especially a mobile that might sometimes have to jump networks partway through the process.
Ironically, having once set out to build an IoT product that could work entirely offline, the further the project progressed, the more and more difficulties that approach presented for general users, and the more the cloud path that was added as an option, started to look preferable in terms of how things should work all the time so that it could become the exclusive focus of development efforts.
My conclusion is that it's very hard to build an offline IoT gadget. Not only the developer, but also the users and marketing people need to understand and accept what sorts of difficulties and limitations that can mean.
So where does it happen? In the situations where the "users" are the "developers" - eg. open source. If you look around a bit, you'll find plenty of gadgets either built form scratch, or more commonly reverse engineered so they can run a custom firmware. Want a local RESTful API? Done! Want could relay via MQTT over SSL to your own broker? Done!
When you control the code, you control the mode.
But with products for the general market, most customers want things to work, not a lengthy technical explanation of why the details of their network setup mean they cannot.
I am struggling to find how to let google home do a local network rest call.
I have some ESP8266 laying around with mDNS and rest api in them.
Now with the google home I want it to send a rest call to the device.
I don't want any web hooks / services like IFTTT. I don't want the communication going through these 3rd party services.
It should work like this google home gets input (google service to understand is oke). It retrieves the action (local network, url rest call with body). Google home sends the rest api call to the local device.
No need to have port forwarding / firewall changes.
The Google Home does very very little on-device processing. Sending out local network calls is not one of the things it does. Almost all processing, including IoT controls through the Smart Home API, are done through cloud-based services.
Update
I can't answer "why" it doesn't do this, since I'm not one of the engineers that built it, but I can make a lot of guesses about why.
For starters - it increases the complexity of the software and hardware on the device dramatically. Right now, the device is really little more than a microphone and a speaker, with a little logic to detect the hotword and then stream everything else to the server, and then get a result back and play it. Most of the rest of the code is likely to handle setup and configuration.
If the device has to also be a general purpose IoT hub, then it needs software and hardware for Bluetooth and possibly other signaling systems. It needs to be able to keep track of the state of other devices on the network and manage that in between power cycles of the device (or even handle interruptions in power for the device itself). Some of the implications of that may need to open up the networking on the device to receive messages, not just send them. It has to have more extensive network configuration - to understand what local networking is and not just what the local router is and how to deal with that configuration (and that configuration when it changes). These are all possible, to be sure, but increase the complexity and, in some cases, lower the security of a device.
And that might be reasonable... if there was significant value in doing so. But you've already stipulated in the question that the voice processing could be done in the cloud, so once commands are sent to the cloud and parsed there - why not also do all of the above (device and state tracking, changing, etc) in the cloud? Particularly since most IoT devices maintain cloud servers anyway because people also want to be able to control or monitor their home devices when they aren't on their home LAN. Having a dual set of commands (some for when you're local, and some when you're not) does make sense in some cases - but also dramatically increases the complexity of both the controller and devices, so most just rely on the cloud, again.
So while I understand why some people would like to have a nice little system that can just sent your play local REST server a command now and then, the reality is that to do this for a consumer system isn't that reasonable.
If you really wanted a system that can do this - you can continue in the hobbyist spirit and build something with the Assistant SDK and your favorite IoT platform.
The “local” API for Google Home is a bit limited. Here’s a doc from someone who reverse-engineered the API.
Looks like they expose Bluetooth and Alarms/Timers, and some limited configuration stuff.
https://rithvikvibhu.github.io/GHLocalApi/
I understand that some applications need to check against a server periodically, but why don't servers let a mobile device know when it's time to update.
For example, let's say you receive an e-mail in gmail. As it stands now, there can be a delay between receiving the e-mail and your device notifying you. I assume this has to do with waiting until the device has checked the gmail server, at which point it sees the new e-mail and notifies the user. It makes more sense to me that when the gmail server receives an e-mail, it should ping (or however the creator wants to implement it) all registered devices to let them know that it's time to update. This way notifications would be synchronized and mobile device could save battery by not having to periodically check a server.
What you are describing is called a "server push". Some mobile applications does use server push. And Google actually have a technology in place to make this easier to implement, named "Cloud to device messaging" (C2DM). It works by having the servers sending a tiny little message, via googles C2DM servers, to the application running on the device, informing it its time for a update. And the device then retrieves the actual update from the original server (not from C2DM).
Its good stuff. It allows the service listening for C2DM manages to wake up the phone and everything. The downside is, the user of the application needs a google account. For android users, this isnt really a downside though.
Except they do, in some cases. In the "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" section of Settings on my iPod, there's a submenu labeled "Fetch New Data", which contains an option to have the mail server or whatever "Push" the data to the iPod. The Fetch aspect, which you can set the schedule for, is for when Push is off or you're syncing with applications that don't support push.
That is how Android does it. It pushes notifications to the device and that api is open to third party developers as well so they can push notifications to their users.
That thing is it is difficult to know the address of a mobile device at any particular time, the I.P address is dynamic, on a server the address is much more stable, so the device knows it will always find Google at google.com but Google has no real way of knowing where to find the device, it wouldn't know where to ping in the first place.
This is where push comes in, there are different implementations but i think they work by having the device maintain a connection to the server, and reestablishing it if its lost.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_technology
This of course is much harder to implement and maintain then a simple client pull.
I want to write an iOS app that can act as a client and a server to other iPhones over the cellular data network (i.e., without a typical centralized server). The goal is to share series of about 200 short event messages, one at a time, from the iPhone server to multiple iPhone clients by some means of notification. Apple Push Notification service would be fine for such notifications, but there is no need to use it specifically.
I think sending push notifications from one iPhone to another is possible by connecting to gateway.push.apple.com from the serving iPhone as described in the Local and Push Notification Programming Guide, but I can't find anyone else discussing this approach (maybe it's too obvious?).
The reason for all this is an attempt to avoid the overhead of infrastructure. If this isn't feasible, alternatives which minimize or avoid additional hardware are welcome.
Requirements:
Communication must be [strictly] over cellular data network
Wi-Fi isn't available
Bluetooth doesn't have enough range
Unidirectional communication with an iPhone server multicasting to many iPhone clients
No jailbreaking
Ideally the serving phone's battery will be able to handle this without a recharge
Update 5/4/11 2:12 AM EST: Just to be clear, I don't have any particular requirement to use APNs; I thought it may have been feasible in this setup, but from the discussion below, it sounds like that's not the case. However, I'm still interested in any other system that could help me achieve the same end result with some type of message passing or similar form of communication.
Theoretically you should be able to write a iOS app that can connect to the APNS and send notifications to other devices running your applications. However, your main problem will be to actually acquire the 'tokens' of other devices. When you have a centralized server doing the job, its always online and thus, the clients can 'talk' to it via http and register them self (giving their tokens to the server in the process). Thus the server knows the client token and it can use them to send notifications to the clients via APNS.
However this is not possible in the scenario you are talking about. But this is not to say its impossible. May be you could use an email account X, to store all client tokens. Every client will send a email to this account with their token in it. So when a another 'client' want to send a notification to another client, it can find out the token by reffering to the inbox of the email account (you can cache this stuff and optimize it in a zillion ways of course).
But the point is some how a (third party(ex: email service provider)/your own) server that is online 24/7 will be involved in the process.
Let us know how you progress with this. It would be interesting to know.
I want to send some Text plus a image from one iphone application to other iphone app but restriction is I should not use a web server in between communication,Is there any way to fulfill it ?
Details: There are two independent devices and could be far enough say out of network. My requirement one app adds some text with a image and sends it to another iphone which can be at any long distance , and the app installed in another iphone will read that info and image into itself.
Actually there is a solution that meets your needs — and that fits to bbums answer:
Create a HTTP-Server on the iPhone, using cocoahttpserver. than you will ask some webservice like whatismyip.com for your public ip. with this your iPhone can be connected worldwide.
But very likely ur wifi-network is not forwarding your port to the iPhone. Ash.
And even if: Now it gets difficult. How to publish your ip from one phone to the other? hmmm... — I got it: I will exchange the information in a centralized space! In the web!
... wait — that would be a Webserver.
You see: Without any kind of server in the Web the users would need to exchange ip manually and have full admin power and knowledge about the local network.
So IMHO bbums answer is the only way to go.
PS: I am working with http server running on iPhones. In local network that works great, especially with bonjour. And you can use them over distance network — but only with reconfiguration of your router — something you shouldn't force your user to do
There is far from enough information to provide a specific answer.
two apps on two different devices?
are the two devices on the same network?
are the two devices both on WiFi?
do you need the user to receive a notification or something if the app isn't running?
If on same device, you can define a custom URL handler in the destination app and then openURL: in the source app to pass the data over. Encode your image and text into the URL, but be careful of size limitations.
If on different devices, there are many possible solutions, but answering the above questions will be critical to actually knowing what solution is appropriate.
Given your comment -- two apps, different devices, arbitrary networks -- then you are going to have to have some kind of server in between. Note that the recently added Game Center does have the ability to rendezvous two users, but it has a very particular user experience that may not be appropriate to your needs.
I would suggest that you investigate using push notifications to notify the receiving user of the availability of content. As for moving the content between, no direct connection is possible and you will have to have some kind of store-and-forward server in between. And, yes, a web server is going to be the easiest possible solution simply because HTTP is ubiquitous these days.
If there's no network of any kind available, but both parties have amateur radio licenses, then hooking the two devices up to HF packet radios might work.
THIS is super EASY.
I would code up some software that can turn data into modem signal, like the good old dial up modem. The device would actually make those annoying buzzing sounds.
You get the phone number for your friends nearest landline and call him.
He places his iPhone near the phones receiver in listen mode and you connect to his phone using your audible modem.
Bingo, via the power of sounds you have sent data which is decoded on his device and all for the very cheap price of a phone call, there are pretty cheap these days especially if you use Skype.
Easy Way (relatively speaking)
A way two apps on different networks can communicate without setting up a web server of some sort is as follows.
Use an existing third party storage system like DropBox.
Each app would need the login and password for your DropBox. Then both apps can read and write files that the other app can see.
An existing app that does this is a shopping list app called ShopShop.
The app on my phone and my wife's phone both link to the same DropBox account and the app keeps the shopping list synced up when one of us adds something to the list.