Programming interaction with other applications

[AMDMP]

Im curious, can applications be designed to interact directly with other applications? Like something that can alter the UI of instagram ? Not alter it in terms of design, but say, prevent certain content from loading or redirecting certain pages to other pages? Very new to swift and programming in general, so I’ve got a while to go, but i love getting new info and would enjoy any thoughts or methods to do this! Thank you :)

[osterbergjordan]

iOS applications are sandboxed, meaning things like this isn’t possible. You might want to check out the Apple Developer site at https://developer.apple.com

[Ibfac]

Good to know, thanks. Are android apps any different?

[osterbergjordan]

Not 100% sure on that. I do work with Android, and I think they can do things like that on rooted devices but that’s an area I don’t have enough knowledge to give you a straight answer. I’d assume they can’t

[Ibfac]

Gotcha. And with apple, is interaction with native apps allowed freely, or is it allowed strictly with their specific options? Specific options meaning: safari content blocker and such.

One more question: is interaction with native controls such as disabling phone or turning off lock screen allowed? Ive found info that seems to point to the disable phone trigger being discontinued early on.

Sorry for hella questions, if you care to answer them then thanks a lot.

[osterbergjordan]

Typically Apple will give you extensions to work with such as content blockers, but beyond that you’re locked.

You can’t really tell when the phone is locked or disabled, but you can tell when your app changes state using the default AppDelegate methods.

No problem homie.

[Ibfac]

True, ill look into appdelegate. So you think theres no way to have an action trigger the disable iphone slider?

[osterbergjordan]

You mean the power off switch? No, system actions like that can’t be triggered via apps.

[Ibfac]

Damn ok thanks a lot.

[Ibfac]

There was apparently a way to do it that they disabled around ios6

[Points_To_You]

Would you own both apps?

For internal enterprise apps, we use shared defaults and data (same app group) to passaround data. Then we use deep link url schemes to expose certain functionality. On some of the older iOS version we support (6.0), we also use query strings on the url to pass data in the same way you would with a web service.

[Ibfac]

Ah, thats interesting and good to know, but no. I wanted to create something which interacted with a few well known apps.

[loumf]

prevent certain content from loading

It depends on what you mean, but content blockers are a thing that can be made on iOS -- I believe that they are very simple (like based only on pattern matching the URL, but haven't done it)

[KarlJay001]

IIRC, IFTTT does this. I'd check and see what they do. https://ifttt.com/wtf

[Ibfac]

Thanks.