My app should post some message to Twitter at the end of each day at the time X. App might not be running at this time X, but it still has to post that message. I don't want to bother user by everyday asking to do this task.
Can I use Push Notification to silently (without any alert view popup, sound or anything else) do some task in my app in some constant time everyday even if it's not running?
thx
There are three 'notification' mechanisms you can send via push: alerts, sounds, and badge values. The way the push notification works is that on the phone it launches the app and hands over the 'push payload' to it with those values. Even if you turn off all three mechanisms, the OS will still have to launch your app each time, which means the user will get interrupted.
In short, you can't have a push happen silently. I doubt, from a user-experience point of view that Apple will allow things to happen on the phone without the user getting notified somehow.
No.
You can't schedule things to be run by your app on a non-jailbroken iPhone.
The only solution is to have a separately hosted service somewhere to which you push details from your app and that runs the scheduled updates on your behalf.
To do so silently is not up to you. The iPhone device has a configuration in which each app with a Push mechanism has settings where one can specify if they want alerts or not. If set to yes, the text of the alert is displayed as well.
sounds like you are trying to "wake up" your app at a specific time each day to perform some type of task. from what i understand about the iPhone this is not possible. you cannot create a cron job or something that will fire on a time you specify. you can run this on the server side and then push a notification to the user telling them that the message has been posted to twitter.
if you are on a jailbroken phone i feel confident that there is some way to do this.
Given that push notification requires that your server send a notification, why not skip a step and have the server just send the update directly to Twitter on the user's behalf? You can't use push notification to trigger an automatic task on the iPhone like you're asking - the user must take the step of accepting the notification for anything to happen.
if you really want to do it from the phone, you can just declare a "long term" background task should be covered around here (iphone app programing guide) some where..., that way you never go sleep, and you can do what ever you like... :)
Related
I'm wondering if there is any way of retrieving the last-received push notification if the app is launched from the home screen instead of by pressing the 'View' button on the notification.
The app we're writing is for dealing with sensitive data, and it's important to be able for the central server to be able to remotely disable a client at will, without having the requirement that the app needs an internet connection to launch.
The basic idea I came up for this would be to send a push notification with a custom payload letting the app know to disable itself until it can properly sync its data.
This would work if the user pressed View on the notification, but not if they cancelled it and then launched the app separately.
I'd love to know if this is possible, or otherwise if there's a better way to implement this functionality.
It's not possible. Your app would have to connect to the server on launch and get its latest status from there. If your use case is that sensitive, push notifications are probably not reliable enough anyway because Apple does not guarantee that a push notification will actually be delivered.
Like Ole said, not possible.
Note that you shouldn't be relying on push notifications for anything like this. From Apple's push notifications programming guide:
Remember that delivery of notifications is “best effort” and is not guaranteed.
I'm reading many things about Local Notifications and the way they can help to update the app badge number.
I'd like to update this badge at midnight, and set its value to a number I can't know before midnight. So I'd like, if possible, to launch a function at midnight that would update/load some datas, check the number to display, and display it on the badge.
Of course, the number to display is not relative to the displayed number, and can be lower or greater.
This is expected to work :
- When app is in background
- When app is in foreground
- When app is not launched
would you know a way to do this, even partially ? If not possible, let say I can make things to know the badge number before midnight... Would this help you for a working answer ? This is not wanted, but if I don't have the choice to make this work, I'll plan to write tons of useless code to do this...
Unless your application fits into one of the "official" multitasking cases (VOIP, location, and background audio), the only way you're going to be able to dynamically set the badge number when your application isn't running is with push notifications... applications can't run code in response to a local notification (until the user presses the "View" button in the notification popup, at least).
See this document for everything you could ever want to know about local and push notifications in iOS.
You can't reliably ensure that your local app will run when it needs to unless you register it as a VoIP app or as requiring continuous location monitoring; either of these, in an app that's not in fact used for VoIP or navigation, will almost certainly result in an App Store rejection.
Your best bet is to send the badge as a push notification. Assuming that a server you control can know what the badge number is supposed to be, it can send a notification with just that badge value—not necessarily an alert popup or sound—to your app. Urban Airship is a good, simple way to send push notifications without having to do a lot of configuration and setup.
You very well may be able to do this. Look at the Apple Guide to running code in the background.
I'm developing an application that needs to take action on completed phone calls, preferably right after the call ends but minimally once per day.
I've read up on the new CoreTelphony framework, and it seems I can get call events if my app is active, but I don't see how to launch/wake my app when a call ends if my app is not the foreground app. I also don't see how any of the new pseudo-background "modes" would allow my app to listen for these events in the background. Do any of you know how this might be done?
If post-call processing isn't possible, then I'd like to figure out a way to automatically wake my app up once per day, pull all of the call events since the last wakeup, and process them. I know how I might do this with Push or Local notifications, but my understanding is that those require user action to continue; in this case, I just want the processing to happen automatically. Is there a mechanism that would enable this?
Thanks,
Dan
You can't launch your app without user interaction.
Push / Local notifications aren't for this kind of thing, they're for letting the user know about event.
On a non-jailbroken device there is no way to do what you want to do.
I have an app that I am working on, and part of its main functionality is to alert the user to do something. So even though they aren't in the app, I want to be able to pop up an alert from the app, reminding them to do something. Is that allowed with the iPhone sdk? Maybe it isn't even a big deal at all, but for some reason I was thinking that it would require background processes or something that may or may not be possible. Anyone who has any thoughts about how this would be implemented would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Check out the Apple documentation on push notifications. Short of jailbreaking and distributing your app outside the App Store, there is no way to run background processes at this time.
It is allowed through notifications, though you will need a server to actually send the notifications to the user. There is no limit to the number you can send, although the user may very well decide to shut off notifications or delete your app altogether if you are too spastic with them. Make very sure the user understands the notification volume they will receive and agrees to it...
The way the system works is the user gets a notification message (and/or sound) and can decide to open your app or not, as the time of notification.
I'm developing a todo list application. I'm looking for any way to alert the user when a task becomes due, even if the app is not running. Is there any way to set the program to run at a specified time w/out user interaction? Or a way to bring up an alert anyway?
Edit: How can I add an item to the calendar?
No, not until the push notification service gets released.
Your best bet right now is allowing users to add reminders to the Calendar - without the push service, there's no notifications without your app running actively.
As has been made very clear by Steve Jobs himself, the iPhone SDK will NOT support background processes. In addition, there is no API to access the calendar on the iPhone.
If these things are important to you, you should file an enhancement request:
Apple Bug Reporter
But even once push is released, that won't enable you to have the application independently alert the user. You would have to run a server that would push notifications to people once a task is approaching due, which means you would have to have everyone's task list synced to your server.