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Lets say you have a sort of a news stand kiosk app where you offer interactive magazines for download. Our newer mags are HTML5-based where we download the individual issues compressed from the server, decompress them and launch them in a (inappbrowser) modal window. Our older mags are basically individual native apps.

Could the older native mags (IPAs) also be downloaded from within the kiosk and launched somehow? Is this technically possible (and allowed at the same time)? Either launching it as a separate process/app or inline i.e. somehow from within the context of a kiosk application? Is that even possible launching an app within an app?

Of course if needed to support the process we could reexport all older apps with correct provisioning, etc. and they (in-apps) would be made available for the review process. Just looking for options on whats technically possible currently.

Thank you!

user3253393
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  • So not sure why this is downvoted - think its a perfectly legitimate question with a genuine use case. We already have this working for downloading HTML5-based content, the question was how would one handle legacy "native" content. Big publishers like Adobe use their own .folio formats for additional resources, was just wondering if you could do this with apps directly (not trying to replace the appstore - provisioning and pricing is still done officially through it). – user3253393 Jul 10 '15 at 16:10

1 Answers1

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Assuming:

  • The older native mags can be downloaded from the AppStore
  • They each support a different URL scheme (e.g. mymagazine1://, mymagazine2://)

you can do the following:

When the user indicates he/she wants to open magazine 1, evaluate

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] canOpenURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"mymagazine1://"]]

If it is YES, open the app with

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"mymagazine1://"]]

If it is NO, open the App Store app for the specific magazine. This can be done in the same way as described in this question.

You cannot open these apps 'inside' your main app, that is simply not possible.

I'm not sure if Apple will approve these apps though - they could ask you to provide this content via Newsstand.

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Glorfindel
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