I've made some iphone webapps before, using jQTouch and iUI but now i want to try out making a native Apps for iPhone. As i first step i thought of trying to port one of my webapps using Phonegap. So far it works well, but i'm a little concerned about some things in the Apple Review Guidelines and wanted to see if anyone have prior experience and could answer som questions.
2.5 Apps that use non-public APIs will be rejected
2.6 Apps that read or write data outside its designated container area will be rejected
I'm not really sure what this means. I don't think they concern me but if anyone could give me som more info about it it would be nice.
2.7 Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected
This one is more tricky. Do they consider HTML code? What my app does is to load content into DIV-tags using jQuery.load()-function, that means much of the work in the app is performed on my server. Will it be "safer" if i generate JSON or XML of the data and process it with JavaScript inside the app instead of loading the formated HTML-code?
2.12 Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected
This one together with the quote:
If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you're trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don't want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.
Made me wonder what they consider a useful app and what lasting entertainment means. This is my first app and i dont aim for a broad audience, this is mostly a way to get to know the XCode, iPhone-development and the App Store review process before. However, the App will be really useful for me and a bunch of my friends.
2.6 Don't specifically try to access files outside your app's Bundle or Documents directory and you should be fine.
2.7 Somewhere, it explicitly says you can download and use HTML/CSS/Javascript as long as you are running it inside an iOS UIWebView container. But don't try to download, say, Lua source code at runtime and interpret it.
2.12 Don't waste the App store reviewer's time if you are just trying to "get to know" the app development or store distribution process. Read about it instead. Submit something only if you think there are people (not just your Mom) who will really want to download your app and not delete it after trying it out. Maybe at least a dozen to hundred someones. If not, distribute some Ad Hoc deployments to your buddys instead.
Related
Is it possible to incorporate one iPhone app into another in order to redistribute it?
We're going to publish few apps owned by other developers and need to create some pre-rolls with our branding and some other similar features. The original developer could build the app for us, but won't provide us with a source code.
Sorry if the question sounds stupid, we haven't very big experience in the field, just need to clarify some things
Thank you!
No you can't. You are only allowed to execute your own app, you can't embed an other app in your bundle.
It is not possible to embed an app into another app, or better, you could do that, but Apple would reject it and anyway you would not be able to launch it on a non jailbroken device.
More to the point of your specific case, if you have only the binaries you could try and modify the resource files (i.e., .nib and .strings files) to modify the UI to some extent. Of course, you would then need to regenerate the signature for the app (and hope that everything works ok).
It's just a thought, but maybe you could include the other developers apps as static libraries. The advantages would be that the other devs wouldn't have to surrender their sources, you wouldn't face any code signing and bundle id related issues and including static libraries is perfectly safe.
The only disadvantage would be that the devs would still need to deliver the content seperately and they need to learn how to build a static library. An entry point for each app / each library to call it would also be needed, maybe even a small interface to allow the container app to learn about the individual apps status, to cancel them etc.
As I said, this is just an idea, there may be issues with that approach that I do fail to see right now. But maybe others can comment on this...
You might want to check out this link to learn a bit about building static objective c libraries.
Check apples Custom URL scheme, it might find useful for you. Just help=> http://iosdevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-application-via-a-custom-url-scheme.html
I am new to iPhone automatic updatability feature where user can change their contents whenever they want and iPhone app should pick them so that one need not to resubmit the application into Apple store. I know that I will need to deal with the database here a lot but if someone could through their idea on the solution design, implementation, and things to be taken care then that would be really helpful to me.
Thanks.
"content" here really means data. Apps can load data over the net to their hearts' content, but they can't load new code. Now, certain data might cause the existing code in the app to do one thing or another, so the app's behavior can be influenced by the data it uses. Don't play too close to the line, though -- if your data is really some form of scripting language that directly drives the behavior of the app, that will likely be deemed unacceptable.
As far as loading the content goes, there are a number of options available. The most common is probably using NSURLConnection asynchronously to load data from a web server. What the app does with the data after that is up to the app designer, and I don't think there's one objectively correct answer to that sort of question.
Apple not only allows this, but presented a session on this data driven app design technique at WWDC 2010, which is available as a video from iTunes to enrolled iOS developers.
Of course, the downloaded "content" can't include executable code, but it can include JavaScript and HTML5 to be run inside UIWebViews, as well as images, sounds, text, databases, etc., which can all be stored for offline use.
This violates apples SDK Agreement and will likely get your app removed from the app store if caught.
It should be mentioned that web apps offer the ultimate in automatic content updates. You can change the content, structure, and features of a web app without ever having to submit your app to Apple or anyone else. Deploying the app is as simple as copying a set of files to your server, and users get the updated version immediately, even if they're currently using the app. Web apps aren't a perfect solution in every case, but their capabilites are compelling if your app is dynamic.
I'm about to begin development of an iPhone app. The app itself is fairly basic, and I want a speedy turnaround time.
I'm a web developer myself, specialising in traditional web technologies such as PHP/MySQL; I have no experience in Objective-C.
My plan was to create a very basic iPhone app that is just a Safari service that passes some basic variables to a URL. That URL is the app built in PHP and housed on my servers, this way I can create the app very quickly without needing to outsource anything.
My question is whether apps of this nature would be accepted into the iTunes store, or would they be out-right rejected? Anyone's experiences or comments are very welcome.
Thanks
It could go either way, but mind bullet 12.3 from the App Store Review Guidelines:
12.3 Apps that are simply web clippings, content aggregators, or a collection of links, may be rejected
In my opinion, a simple UIWebView wrapper around your web site comes close to the definition of a simple web clipping. Your approval may very well hinge on your luck in drawing a sympathetic reviewer.
It really depends upon your application...These kinds of application have been approved in the past but again I am saying that it depends on many factors.
Try to test your app in every possible manner and also keep in mind the memory issues.
Best of luck!!!
Should be fine - its called a web app and there is software out there that will do just this for you.
All you need to do is to make a UIWebView and put your web app into it.
Also look at http://jqtouch.com. That gives you some idea of what you can do web-side. :)
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Yes, it will be accepted as long as you stick with HTML, CSS, JS and Obj-C on the client side. You still need to wrap it in an iPhone app. In my experience, the best way to this is to use http://www.phonegap.com/ or a similar framework.
You'll have the option of deploying you app through iTunes or as a regular web app (you users will be able to create a link to your web app right on their springboards)
It SHOULD be accepted, granted you test test test and make it look just like a native application. Also you'll have to make sure that your server is never down, or if the application can't reach it just display an error message. You also have to keep in mind that there are a lot of iPod Touch users, and they don't have access to the internet all the time. Which means that chances are you'll get a BUNCH of 1 star reviews
I'm not all that familiar with Apple's iPhone development system, but I'm trying to figure out if theres a way for developers who create custom iPhone apps to update their apps on a mass scale. For example, would a company who publishes hundreds of apps have to resubmit every app they've made manually if they find a minor bug that affects all their apps (assuming they have used a template)? Or is it possible to somehow use or build a custom program that can make this process easier, by automatically generating or updating apps? I don't believe Apple has an API or anything, but it just seems like it would be a nightmare for these developers to fix bugs, and thought maybe I was missing something.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Apple provides no way to automate this. In theory you could write a program to simulate a browser to login and upload new binaries for you, but I'm not sure Apple would like that very much, and it would be a lot of work.
In addition, one might argue that if the apps are similar enough to warrant this automation, it should probably be one app instead of many. But that may be an over generalization without knowing your use case.
There's the Application Loader
http://itunesconnect.apple.com/apploader/ApplicationLoader_1.2.dmg
(requires login)
It doesn't do bulk uploads, but it does provide a maybe more accessible interface.
Isn't there that separate application that you can use to talk to iTunesConnect? (Though I still don't think it's possible to do mass updates.)
I was wondering if I could access the iPhones Core Location framework over a website?
My goal is to build a webapp/website that the iPhone would browse to, then upload its current GPS location. This would be a simple site primary for friends/family so we could locate each other. I can have them manually enter lng/lat but its not the easiest thing to find. If the iPhone could display or upload this automatically it would be great.
I don't own a Mac yet (waiting for the new Mac Book Pro) but would like something a little more automatic right now. Once I have the mac I could download the SDK and build a better version later. For now a webapp version would be great if possible. Thanks.
Why not simply use W3C GeoLocation API available in mobile Safari? This will work on ipod touch as well (suburb precision).
It's literally 10 lines of code and the javascript will work without change on Firefox 3.5. Far easier than scrape some third party website.
http://www.instamapper.com/iphone
iPhone App store
While this may not directly answer your question, there are quite a few iPhone apps that already do this kind of thing with GPS. Instamapper is the first one I pulled up from the app store, but I'm sure you could find something to fit your needs.
I'm pretty sure you can't do what you want directly.
The best idea I can come up with is to "reuse" an iPhone app that records location and makes it accessible on the web. Take Twitter for example. If I'm not mistaken, Tapulous' app Twinkle will grab your location and post it to your Twitter.com user profile. Here's an example of what that looks like:
From your webapp, you could then scrape the user page for each person whose location you're interested in. It's a pain in the butt, but like I said, this is the best I could come up with.
Again, if you don't want to mess with Twitter, there may be other apps out there that do this as well, but I don't personally know of any. Good luck.
We built a really thin iphone client app that simply calls a predefined .js file on our site. Works like a charm.
See arisgames.org for the project.