HI,
I am developing an application for an esteemed client in Australia. They have certain copyright issues when it comes to uses outside Australia accessing the content via the app.
Is it possible to have a local and an international version of the app, both available via iTunes Store? The international version will only have permissible content. If not, please advice the best option to deal with this issue.
Thanking you in anticipation
Cheers,
Amit
Yes, you can create two versions of the application with different SKUs. The best way to do this would by by using a wildcard certificate and using a different project identifier in the application's plist file.
Using the administrative panel on iTunes Connect you can then restrict the sale of the SKUs to different territories.
These options become available when you have paid the $99 for a development certificate, and and when you upload your application to iTunes.
As others have noted, it's possible to build two versions and to use the iTunes store to restrict distribution based on the nation where the buyer is located.
However there's another issue to consider. You say that the problem is "accessing the content via the app" outside of Australia. But you're on a platform which is inherently mobile, and may not be located in the same country it was when the user got your app. What happens if someone is in Australia, gets the app legitimately, and then travels to some other country? They're no longer in Australia but they have a copy of the app that assumes they are. Would your client's copyright restrictions still permit them to access content that's supposed to be Australia-only?
If not, your problem is rather different than using app-store restrictions. But it might also mean that you get to have a better solution to the problem that doesn't require multiple versions of the app.
Think about it: the iPhone knows where it is. A 3g phone can get GPS-accurate location info, and the older phones get reasonable approximations anytime they have a phone network connection. That gives you lat/long coordinates.
What then? Since your home area is pretty well defined, it might be simple-- draw a rectangle around Australia on a map, and define "in Australia" as being in that rectangle (being a whole continent comes in handy here). If you want something more precise, feed that lat/long into a reverse-geocoding API (there are many-- Flickr has one, for example) to find out what country you're in.
And voila, you can make the app behave one way in Australia and another way outside of it, and you only need one version of the app to do it.
You can restrict which apps are sold in which country/geographical region. Your Australian app you can restrict to Australia and sell another app worldwide.
Related
I have made application only visible to Germany, Now Apple informed to include Monitoring Shape-Based Regions for if the user move away after installing from Germany? How to monitor the region to restrict the application if exceed Germany area?
I have tried with following links
1) Core Location region monitoring
2) Apple: Location Awareness Programming Guide
My doubt is how to restrict application only available to Germany. Should I try with latitude, longitude. And how to monitor the regions/territory exception.
I uploaded it to the app store, but they reject with the following reason :
22.1: Apps must comply with all legal requirements in any location where they are made available to users. It is the developer's
obligation to understand and conform to all local laws.Please see
Monitoring Shape-Based
Regions
for information on how to apply Geo restriction.
My doubt is how to restrict Geo location.
By default, the app will be available in all countries the App Store currently supports, unless you specifically select individual countries/stores. You can choose individual countries.
log into iTunesConnect and click Manage Your Apps. Select your app and click the Rights and Pricing button. You can select the stores you want from this page. For More you can
review the page 48
Update
As Updated
Easiest way to solve this topic would probably is to decide which countries you want to make your app available in ? and as i have search something like review countries local laws to see if any thing is illegal related to the app. And this relate to your Questions
What if I make my app available on other countries than usa?
If your application relies on location services to function properly,
you should include the UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities key in the app’s Info.plist file.
You can use this key to specify the location services that must be present in order to execute your application. The App Store uses the information in this key from preventing users from downloading apps to devices that do not contain the listed features.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userexperience/conceptual/LocationAwarenessPG/CoreLocation/CoreLocation.html
this link contains all the information you need.
I need to develop an application that will behave differently depending on the user's country. Let's say, if the user is in France, some functionality would be available. But, if the user were from India, he would be able to acces a different set of functionality.
If it were only language based restrictions, I could switch functionality using NSLocale class methods. But my functionality is really dependent on the user's country because of licensing and legal reasons.
What are the best practices for dealing with this situation?
For each market where you have specific requirements due to market-specific licensing or legal issues, you can create a separate app in iTunes Connect and make it available for download only in the relevant market. And if you need to, this also allows you to provide a market-specific EULA. It's a big maintenance burden, but it would ensure that only users in a given market can access the app.
Note that in XCode you can fairly easily build, deploy and publish multiple versions of your project built from different configurations (XCode calls this "Targets"), so you could still achieve this in a single codebase by simply adding some preprocessor definitions in the relevant target definitions and putting #ifdef in your code where you want differentiated logic.
A 3rd party app has no access whatsoever to any information about the user of the device or access to the iTunes account. There is no way to know the user's true country. At any given time, the device may not even be associated with any one person. An iPod touch, for example, may have no user logged into any iTunes account. The same device can ultimately be logged into one of several different accounts.
All you have access to is the user's current GPS location (if the user allows your app to access that information) or their current locale.
Basically, there is no way to do what you need. Of course you could prompt the user but obviously there is no way to verify this information.
I'm going to release an app in the UK and US App Stores. I would like to have two different data sources according to the store my application is downloaded from. Basically I would like my app to connect to my US servers when downloaded from the US store and to the UK servers when downloaded from the british one.
I was thinking of including the origin URL in the as localised string but I don't think this is a stable solution.
Any idea?
thanks a lot
Claus
I'm not sure, but I don't think the app has knowledge from where it was downloaded from.
You could create two apps, one for UK and one for US, and make the apps only available in their respective local App Stores.
However, depending on the amount of apps you would have to produce (if you intend to distribute your app in more than 2 countries in the future), it might be easier to just ask the user which data source to use on startup, or let him define one in the settings etc.
Or use the iPhone's current language or even location to select the data source.
I am a member of a gliding club with 150 members, and we want to have our own iPhone app. Requiring a member login, the app would be usable only by members of the club, and it would be used by an estimated 20-30 people.
Is it even possible to disribute such an app to non-jailbroken iPhones? According to my research:
It wouldn't be accepted on the App Store due to "limited audience".
Even if we were able and willing to pay $300 for the enterprise distribution model, Apple would likely not accept us as a company.
Ad hoc distribution would be fine for us except for the expiration time associated with apps distributed in the manner.
Are we at a dead end?
Thanks.
Edit: In case anyone is wondering why I didn't just ask Apple directly: I did, and their answer was, "We are unable to advise you with respect to the Apple Developer Program that best fits your needs."
I'm not 100% on your question.
But depending on your requirement, pretty much everything you need can be achieved as a web app, with the correct coding behind it i.e. CACHE MANIFEST you could make the app function similar to the a native app, available offline and can be saved to any iOS device through the browser.
Give me a shout if you need more information.
Hope it helps
Gary
You could always try to make the app a little more "global"? Perhaps offer some free stuff for Joe Bloggs to use, but tucked away you have your real motive... that way you can get it released legitimately.
I've seen some real disasters in the app store that shouldn't have made it, and I'm sure Apples screening isn't as intense as we might think. (example: that flash light application, when pressing a sequence of buttons it would enable free tethering).
Best of luck!
Yup. You seem to have all the options laid out pretty clearly, and there's no other way to do it. Except developing for android, and just distributing the application freely and without arbitrary restrictions.
Sorry.
Ad-hoc distribution would give you about 90 days expiration time, i think, whereas enterprise would give you a year. Though gaining enterprise status in the eyes of apple is easier said than done.
Even if we were able and willing to pay $300 for the enterprise distribution model, Apple would likely not accept us as a company.
You don't have to be a company to apply for the enterprise account, you just need to be an organisation with a DUNS number.
I am new to iphone stuff. After deploying an application in iTunes is there a way to find out the number of iphone/ipod touch which has installed / uninstalled this application ?
During uninstall the user is asked to rate the application, how to get that information with a developer license credentials ?
Apple tells you the number of sales (and the number of upgrades) in iTunes Connect. What they don't tell you is how many people have uninstalled your application or, more importantly, how many people are still using it n days after installing it.
You may be able to get this information (and more) using one of the third party analytic tools such as Flurry, although Apple has recently started to object to service like them. Another option would be to gather the same kind of information on your own server.
It would be really nice if Apple provided better information but, unfortunately, they don't at the moment.
All this data is provided through Apples iTunes connect site
https://itunesconnect.apple.com
Additionally you could subscribe to one of the support sites like
http://www.appfigures.com
which will give you nice graphs on sales etc
You should also take a look at Flurry Analytic's. Not only will it tell you how many unique devices it has been installed on, but you can add events as well. So lets say your app has a "Featured Listings" area or something like that. Flurry will log how many times people enter into the "Featured" area. It will help track conversion rates...
Also shows you the navigation path the user took. So they click on , "search", then they click on "homes", then they clicked on "featured"... yada yada yada... it provides excellent information.
If your app uses Core Location you can even see a dot on a map as to where the user was when they did all of this.
http://www.flurry.com/
-LT
The information provided by iTunes Connect is the number of downloads of your app. The ratings and reviews are actually not provided via iTunes Connect, but you can find it indirectly on the app store.
There are some services that aggregate all this information for you. A new one is www.appannie.com which shows you both downloads and ratings.
For number of installed Apple just updated https://itunesconnect.apple.com site you can adjust the date range in the middle of screen (using the slider) or by adjusting the dates on top left corner after navigating to sale and trends screen to see how many downloads you have had.